The Garden of Love and Other Stories
by David Green
"Expect the unexpected. Green is an informed, intelligent, refined writer. In these stories lucidity wins out, where all along there is the pleasure of exploring complexity."
—Keith Botsford
"The intensely imagined dreamscapes are fresh and beautifully written."
—Michael Coffey
"The patient reader will find pleasure in these superb romantic meditations on a world filled with things, decay, and memories. "
—Christopher Ohge, in The Arts Fuse
Written in flowing, descriptive prose, The Garden of Love is comprised of a variety of styles, settings, and narrative techniques. Each story presents not just a different subject, but a different way of seeing the world. From the realism of the opening stories, the collection moves through narratives of Ovidian transformation and Borgesian inversion to conclude with tenuous voices of elusive identity. Along the way, we encounter a man who dreams for others, a book that mirrors its reader, and a widow who takes her husband’s soul on a journey to the end of the world. Readers who enjoy the imaginative departures of writers as different as Raymond Carver and Italo Calvino will find much to like in these stories.
Praise for David Green
"In the tradition of Nabokov's Pale Fire, Green has written a book entwining fiction and commentary. Green sees language as an endless Mobius strip, and he would like to record all the words spoken in a lifetime the way Borges wrote of tracing footsteps of a lifetime. In the critical introduction, letters, diary, and novella included here, he reworks in different styles these same metaphysical speculations. His deceptively beautiful novella, Landfall, which he comments on elsewhere in the book, is a lushly written story of a shipwrecked man in a Spain of the imagination that fans of Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom will enjoy. Great intellectual fun..."
—Gene Shaw, in Library Journal
"Atchley furthers the contemporary dialogue between 'deconstructionist' philosophy and 'postmodern' fiction with the propounding of an engaging literary enigma: Has a certain author of 'Borgesian' fictions invented the critic who writes about him, or has an ingenious critic invented the author about whom he has become a leading expert? Taken as a whole, Atchley is a genuine inquiry into the relationship between two styles of writing, two uses of mind, and two ways of being.
—Charles Stein, author of The Hat Rack
About the author
David Green lives, writes, and teaches in Boston, Massachusetts.
His novel, Atchley, was published in 1998 by Station Hill Arts.
