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Product Details
Scribner, March 2009
Trade Paperback, 224 pages
ISBN-10: 1416539085
ISBN-13: 9781416539087
Description
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.
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Browse Inside The Mother Garden"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, author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier
-- Ann Packer, author of The Dive from Clausen's Pier
"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, author of Follies
-- Ann Beattie, author of Follies
"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, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
-- Peter Orner, author of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
"These fresh, unpredictable stories tackle the most difficult of subjects -- death -- with a fairytale 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, author of Music Through the Floor
-- Eric Puchner, author of Music Through the Floor
South Florida Sun-Sentinel, February 22, 2009
...have to rage against the dying of the light. Her daughter was there to do it for her. Robin Romm, an accomplished author, was 19 when her mother, a dynamic woman and civil rights lawyer in Oregon, was diagnosed. It would be nine hard-fought ...
Register-Guard, February 1, 2009
...to easily identifiable local people ? attorneys, physicians and a rabbi ? albeit by only first names. But Robin Romm?s latest book, a memoir of the last three weeks of her mother?s life, ratchets that familiarity up to a new and sometimes ...
Hartford Courant, January 25, 2009
...have to rage against the dying of the light. Her daughter was there to do it for her. Robin Romm, an accomplished author, was 19 when her mother, a dynamic woman and civil rights lawyer in Oregon, was diagnosed. It would be nine hard-fought ...
International Herald Tribune, January 7, 2009
...The Mercy Papers A Memoir of Three Weeks By Robin Romm 213 pages. Scribner. $22. The foundational condition of being human is that we're going to die. Almost as basic a truth is that we seem incapable of believing ...
Robin Romm's Books
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The Mercy PapersA profound, brave and intensely intimate memoir that reveals the awe, fear, and fury of a daughter during the last three weeks of her mother's life.Read More
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