A Garden amid Fires: stories

by Gladys Swan

Nine stories...skillfully track time's toll on the ability to live and love fully. -- Publishers Weekly. "With A GARDEN AMID FIRES Swan claims new mastery of the short story. A wide variety of settings adds brilliance to important the irresistible powers of memory, the confusions of exile, genuineness and falsity in art, the integrity of loneliness...Uncannily good." -- Fred Chappell.

158 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Gladys Swan is both a writer and a visual artist. She has published two novels, Carnival for the Gods in the Vintage Contemporaries Series, and Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices, nominated by LSU Press for the PEN Faulkner and PEN West awards. News from the Volcano, a novella and stories, set mostly in New Mexico, was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. The Tiger’s Eye: New & Selected Stories is the most recent of her seven collections of short fiction. Her stories have been selected for various anthologies, including Best of the West. Her fiction has appeared in the Sewanee Review, Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Chelsea, Shenandoah, Ohio Review, New Letters, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Hunger Mountain, Hotel Amerika, and others. Her paintings have been used for the covers of three of her books and for those of other writers as well as for several literary magazines. She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the Fundacion Valpariso in Spain, the Chateau de Lavigny in Switzerland, the Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, where she has also been a Guest Writer. She has received a Lilly Endowment Open Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship to Yugoslavia, as well as a Lawrence Foundation Award for fiction and a Tate Prize for poetry.