Wonder garden
In her stunning debut collection, The Wonder Garden , Lauren Acampora brings to the page with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These linked stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, incisive tales that reveal at each turn the unseen...
| Main Author: | Acampora, Lauren. |
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| Format: | Books Print Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
New York :
Grove Press,
c2015.
|
| Edition: | First edition. |
| Subjects: |
| Summary: |
In her stunning debut collection, The Wonder Garden , Lauren Acampora brings to the page with enchanting realism the myriad lives of a suburban town and lays them bare. These linked stories take a trenchant look at the flawed people of Old Cranbury, incisive tales that reveal at each turn the unseen battles we play out behind drawn blinds, the creeping truths from which we distract ourselves, and the massive dreams we haul quietly with us and hold close. John likes to arrive first. He enjoys standing quietly with a house before his clients arrive, and today, although he feels pinned beneath an invisible weight, he resolves to savor this solitary moment. It's one of those overhauled ranches so common to Old Cranbury these days, swollen and dressed to resemble a colonial. White, of course, with ornamental shutters and latches pretending to hold them open. A close echo of its renovated sisters on Whistle Hill Road, garnished with hostas and glitzed with azaleas. He has seen too many of these to count. A man strikes an under-the-table deal with a surgeon to spend a few quiet seconds closer to his wife than he's ever been; a young soon-to-be mother looks on in paralyzing astonishment as her husband walks away from a twenty-year career in advertising at the urging of his spirit animal; an elderly artist risks more than he knows when he's commissioned by his newly-arrived neighbors to produce the work of a lifetime. |
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| Physical Description: |
354 p. ; 22 cm. |
| ISBN: |
0802123554 9780802123558 |
| Author Notes: |
Lauren Acampora is the author of The Wonder Garden , winner of the GLCA New Writers Award and a finalist for the New England Book Award; The Paper Wasp, longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize; and The Hundred Waters, named a Best Book of 2022 by Vogue. She is a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Fiction from The New York Foundation for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Paris Review, Guernica, The New York Times Book Review, and LitHub, among other places. She lives in Westchester County, New York with her husband, artist Thomas Doyle, and their daughter. |