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. "An extraordinary sensitivity to the experience of the garden—be it through vision, touch, or scent—lends unity to Garden Stories . This little hardback will suit anybody who likes to get their hands dirty, as well as those who prefer to admire the blooms from a distance." — TImes Literary Supplement (London) 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 . 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 curio