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Original Essays | October 18, 2009

Victoria Hislop: IMG From Leprosy to Lorca — Strange Inspiration



My first novel, The Island, was inspired by a chance visit to a tiny island leper colony off the coast of Greece on our summer holiday. It was a... Continue »
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1 Burnside Literature- A to Z

The Mother Garden: Stories

by Robin Romm

The Mother Garden: Stories Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Robin Romm's arresting and resonant stories take on the fundamental themes of the human condition: mortality, loyalty, and love. In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm captures the mo-ments before and after loss, mining the depths of grief with wit and grace.

The stories in The Mother Garden are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre — a man uses a chicken egg to test whether he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; a family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping in the desert after twenty-six years of living without him. People stumble in relationships, start families, struggle with illness, learn to mourn — and as in life, these acts are consuming, magical, and disorienting.

Sharply funny and deeply moving, this extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of fierce originality and prodigious talent.

Review:

"These stories are fantastic — in both senses of the word. They are also eerie and moving, and they mark the debut of a very gifted young writer." Ann Packer

Review:

"The Mother Garden presents a wonderful new voice. I found the stories full of lively quirkiness, many individual sentences pulsing with surprising word choices and imagery, and graceful endings that made me smile — sometimes quite nervously, but always appreciatively." Ann Beattie

Review:

"Imagination soars over sorrow in these heartfelt, darkly comic — and most important — fearless stories. Robin Romm is a writer of tremendous grace, and this is a striking first collection." Peter Orner

Review:

"These fresh, unpredictable stories tackle the most difficult of subjects — death — with a fairy-tale strangeness that makes them unique. With dreamlike clarity, Romm charts the altered state of grief, beckoning us into a surreal yet sharply familiar world." Eric Puchner

Review:

"In her embrace of the off-kilter (one story is aptly titled 'The Tilt'), Romm is mining the same vein as Aimee Bender and Judy Budnitz, whose recent collections have featured, respectively, a pumpkin-head family and a woman whose pregnancy lasts for years. But Romm is a close-up magician, more intimate and less instinctively fabulist, and most of her work leaves room for rational interpretation." Gregory Cowles, New York Times Book Review

Review:

"Robin Romm has a darkly humorous tone, an eye for surreal possibilities and an engrossing voice that establishes distance without sacrificing emotional effect. This debut collection augurs a promising future for her." The Miami Herald

Review:

"The bizarre twists in Romm's otherwise familiar stories require the reader to take leaps of faith, but the author handles the material delicately and matter-of-factly, making it believable. Imaginative and insightful." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"A combination of spare prose and fantastic events make Romm's seemingly simple tales startling and compelling." Booklist

Synopsis:

Written with humor, wisdom, and imagination, the stories collected here capture the moments before and after loss. In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm weaves together tales of mothers, fathers, lovers, dogs, and objects that disappear and reappear.

Product Details

ISBN:
9781416539025
Subtitle:
Stories
Author:
Romm, Robin
Publisher:
Scribner Book Company
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Short Stories (single author)
Subject:
Loss (psychology)
Subject:
Stories (single author)
Subject:
Short stories
Publication Date:
July 2007
Binding:
Hardcover
Grade Level:
General/trade
Language:
English
Pages:
191
Dimensions:
8 x 5 in

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