Lead short story featured in 1993 Best American Short Stories A wide variety of characters saunter, stalk, run, and sometimes hide in these lively stories about contemporary Southerners. Their experiences revolve around the way life is felt and the way it is lived, reflecting a gap between the plans we make for ourselves and the way things actually turn out. From the jungles of Vietnam to the bayous of Louisiana, from the French countryside to Vicksburg, Mississippi, Ely’s stories reveal how human beings’ unpredictable, unconscious motivations will have their say no matter what steps are taken to silence them. Certain shadows fall over all the characters—especially the shadows of the Vietnam experience and the struggle between a traditional Southern heritage and the conflicting ideals of contemporary society. The characters in Ely’s stories seem powerless to defend themselves against the ever-changing expectations of a modern life, and yet they gain a new humanity and depth when, with dignity, they embrace their limitations.

A wonderful collection of creative, entertaining stories, Overgrown: Tales of the Unexpected presents eight short stories, including the work of Josh Browning, Amy S. Dalrymple, Chad Jones, Matthew Hance, Ben Orlando, Brad Pauquette, Birney Reed and Kim Younkin. These overgrown tales, all written by talented authors in Central Ohio, will delight adult readers with their wit, intrigue, insight and honesty. These fantastic stories range in genre from comedy to the supernatural, and drama to science fiction.

A unique collection of short stories from the bizarre to the sublime. Covering a town so overgrown with foliage that the inhabitants cannot escape, to a worn-out college recruiter tempting minds instead of bodies, to a giant tomato racing across the George Washington Bridge, to a co-dependent wife trying to free herself from an alcoholic husband, to a grandmother trying to protect her family from an evil red demon, to a childless man trying to clone his boyhood baseball idol and raise him as his son, to a Russian peasant girl who kisses frogs hoping for her prince to materialize before her eyes, to a desperate gambler who makes a deal with God to receive winners every Sunday, and more, this collection of short stories is one of the most unique you will ever read.

Comic, elegaic, and always formally intricate, using political allegory and painterly landscape, philosophic story and dramatic monologue, these poems describe a moment when something marvelous and unforeseen alters the course of a single day, a year, or an entire life.

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.

Discover how a Cuban native left his homeland after Fidel Castro's communist takeover, trained for a massive planned U.S. military attack on Castro and overcame language and cultural barriers to excel in America. "From Cuba with Love" details Pablo Umpierre's idyllic childhood before communism. Castro nationalized all businesses, including the robust retail business Umpierre's father had worked a lifetime to create. Pablo Umpierre chose to leave his parents, brother and extended family for a new life. When he arrived in Miami on June 16, 1962, Pablo Umpierre had just 10 cents to his name. Pablo Umpierre ended up joining a top-secret Cuban brigade commissioned by the U.S. Army. Learn about the underreported volunteer Cuban battalion, where the group trained, how the group was honorably discharged, how Umpierre settled in Los Angeles, Calif., met singer Dean Martin, found the love of his life and started a family.