Garden Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593321308 ISBN 13: 9780593321300

Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of short stories from around the world that celebrate gardens and gardeners

Gardens have been fruitful settings for stories ever since Adam and Eve were ejected from Paradise. This delightfully wide-ranging collection brings together all sorts of tales of the tilled earth, featuring secret gardens, enchanted gardens, gardens public and private, grand and humble.
 
Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Garden-Party.” The family in Doris Lessing’s “Flavours of Exile” hauls succulent vegetables and fruits from the rich African soil, and Colette in “Bygone Spring” luxuriates in extravagantly blooming flowers. Children discover their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros’s “The Monkey Garden” and Italo Calvino’s “The Enchanted Garden,” while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell’s “The French Scarecrow” and Jamaica Kincaid's "The Garden I Have in Mind."
 
Gardens of the imagination round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time,” ravenous orchids in John Collier’s “Green Thoughts,” and Matsudo Aoko’s “Planting,” in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given—roses and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. Garden Stories is an abundant crop of entrancing stories and the perfect gift for gardeners of all kinds.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DIANA SECKER TESDELL is the editor of fifteen Everyman's Pocket Classics anthologies, including New York Stories, Christmas Stories, Love Stories, Stories of Art and Artists, Dog Stories, Cat Stories, Stories of the Sea, Horse Stories, Bedtime Stories, Stories of Fatherhood, Stories of Motherhood, Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories, Wedding Stories, and Stories from the Kitchen, as well as the Pocket Poets anthology Lullabies and Poems for Children.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

from MY ANTONIA, by Willa Cather

I do not remember our arrival at my grandfather’s farm sometime before daybreak, after a drive of nearly twenty miles with heavy work-horses. When I awoke, it was afternoon. I was lying in a little room, scarcely larger than  the bed that held me, and the window-shade at my head was flapping softly in a warm wind. A tall woman, with wrinkled brown skin and black hair, stood looking down at me; I knew that she must be my grandmother. She had been crying, I could see, but when I opened my eyes she smiled, peered at me anxiously, and sat down on the foot of my bed.
 
“Had a good sleep, Jimmy?” she asked briskly. Then in a very different tone she said, as if to herself, “My, how you do look like your father!” I remembered that my father had been her little boy; she must often have come to wake him like this when he overslept. “Here are your clean clothes,” she went on, stroking my coverlid with her brown hand as she talked. “But first you come down to the kitchen with me, and have a nice warm bath behind the stove. Bring your things; there’s nobody about.”
 
“Down to the kitchen” struck me as curious; it was always “out in the kitchen” at home. I picked up my shoes and stockings and followed her through the living-room and down a flight of stairs into a basement. This basement was divided into a dining-room at the right of the stairs and a kitchen at the left. Both rooms were plastered and whitewashed – the plaster laid directly upon the earth walls, as it used to be in dugouts. The floor was of hard cement. Up under the wooden ceiling there were little half-windows with white curtains, and pots of geraniums and wandering Jew in the deep sills. As I entered the kitchen, I sniffed a pleasant smell of gingerbread baking. The stove was very large, with bright nickel trimmings, and behind it there was a long wooden bench against the wall, and a tin washtub, into which grandmother poured hot and cold water. When she brought the soap and towels, I told her that I was used to taking my bath without help.
 
“Can you do your ears, Jimmy? Are you sure? Well, now, I call you a right smart little boy.”
 
It was pleasant there in the kitchen. The sun shone into my bath-water through the west half-window, and a big Maltese cat came up and rubbed himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed, my grandmother busied herself in the dining-room until I called anxiously, “Grandmother, I’m afraid the cakes are burning!” Then she came laughing, waving her apron before her as if she were
shooing chickens.
 
She was a spare, tall woman, a little stooped, and she was apt to carry her head thrust forward in an attitude of attention, as if she were looking at something, or listening to something, far away. As I grew older, I came to believe that it was only because she was so often thinking of things that were far away. She was quick-footed and energetic in all her movements. Her voice was high and rather shrill, and she often spoke with an anxious inflection, for she was exceedingly desirous that everything should go with due order and decorum. Her laugh, too, was high, and perhaps a little strident, but there was a lively intelligence in it. She was then fifty-five years old, a strong woman, of unusual endurance.
 
After I was dressed, I explored the long cellar next the kitchen. It was dug out under the wing of the house, was plastered and cemented, with a stairway and an outside door by which the men came and went. Under one of the windows there was a place for them to wash when they came in from work.
 
While my grandmother was busy about supper, I settled myself on the wooden bench behind the stove and got acquainted with the cat – he caught not only rats and mice, but gophers, I was told. Th e patch of yellow sunlight on the floor travelled back toward the stairway, and grandmother and I talked about my journey, and about the arrival of the new Bohemian family; she said they were to be our nearest neighbours. We did not talk about the farm in Virginia, which had been her home for so many years. But after the men came in from the fields, and we were all seated at the supper table, then she asked Jake about the old place and about our friends and neighbours there.
 
My grandfather said little. When he first came in he kissed me and spoke kindly to me, but he was not demonstrative. I felt at once his deliberateness and personal dignity, and was a little in awe of him. The thing one immediately noticed about him was his beautiful, crinkly, snow-white beard. I once heard a missionary say it was like the beard of an Arabian sheik. His bald crown only made it more impressive.
 
Grandfather’s eyes were not at all like those of an old man; they were bright blue, and had a fresh, frosty sparkle. His teeth were white and regular – so sound that he had never been to a dentist in his life. He had a delicate skin, easily roughened by sun and wind. When he was a young man his hair and beard were red; his eyebrows were still coppery.
 
As we sat at the table, Otto Fuchs and I kept stealing covert glances at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led an adventurous life in the
Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits. His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia, and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while. He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement
to the north of us, but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
 
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale; he had been riding him to fi nd out whether he had any bad tricks, but he was a “perfect gentleman,” and his name was Dude. Fuchs told me everything I wanted to know: how he had lost his ear in a Wyoming blizzard when he was a stage-driver, and how to throw a lasso. He promised to rope a steer for me before sundown next day. He got out his “chaps” and silver spurs to show them to Jake and me, and his best cowboy boots, with tops stitched in bold design – roses, and true-lover’s knots, and undraped female figures. These, he solemnly explained, were angels.
 
Before we went to bed, Jake and Otto were called up to the living-room for prayers. Grandfather put on silver-rimmed spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was so sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings. I was awed by his intonation of the word “Selah.” “He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom He loved. Selah.” I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular, the most sacred of words. Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me. I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west of Black Hawk – until you came to the Norwegian settlement, where there were several. Our neighbours lived in
sod houses and dugouts – comfortable, but not very roomy. Our white frame house, with a storey and half-storey above the basement, stood at the east end of what I might call the farmyard, with the windmill close by the kitchen door. From
the windmill the ground sloped westward, down to the barns and granaries and pig-yards. Th is slope was trampled hard and bare, and washed out in winding gullies by the rain. Beyond the corncribs, at the bottom of the shallow draw,
was a muddy little pond, with rusty willow bushes...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Everyman's Library
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593321308
• ISBN 13: 9780593321300
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 400
• Herausgeber: Tesdell Diana Secker
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland