Gardenland

Garden writing is not just a place to find advice about roses and rutabagas; it also contains hidden histories of desire, hope, and frustration and tells a story about how Americans have invested grand fantasies in the common soil of everyday life. Gardenland chronicles the development of this genre across key moments in American literature and history, from nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization to the twentieth-century rise of factory farming and environmental advocacy to contemporary debates about public space and social justice—even to the consideration of the future of humanity’s place on earth. In exploring the hidden landscape of desire in American gardens, Gardenland examines literary fiction, horticultural publications, and environmental writing, including works by Charles Dudley Warner, Henry David Thoreau, Willa Cather, Jamaica Kincaid, John McPhee, and Leslie Marmon Silko. Ultimately, Gardenland asks what the past century and a half of garden writing might tell us about our current social and ecological moment, and it offers surprising insight into our changing views about the natural world, along with realms that may otherwise seem remote from the world of leeks and hollyhocks.

Prisoners of the Mind focuses on two veterans of World War II and takes place in the late 1950s, some twenty years after both suffered wartime trauma in separate incidences. Medical scans now tell us that such experiences change the brain, leaving such vets trapped by post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), complete with frightening flashbacks, angry outbursts, feelings of being cut off from others and being constantly on guard. The symptoms have governed their lives, but one has overcome his suffering; the other hasn't. They interact at a wrecking yard next to a produce market where they work. In this work of fiction, the reader is presented with an unexpected and startling ending.