The Garden in Which I Walk - Reviews

Karen Brennan's haunting, provocative stories remind me of the very best of Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Angela Carter, and Kafka....Karen Brennan's fourteen stories are all, in fact, disturbing but necessary epiphanies for our post-modern lives, revelations filled with scathing poignancy and perceptive melancholy, the kind of dark, ineffable melancholy you encounter in the late poetry of Coleridge or in Keats' late poem "To Autumn."

—New Pages

Some of these stories assemble deliberately dissimilar elements together and play off the comedy implicit in serious absurdities. Other stories are more conventional in their conception although Brennan is neither trite nor obvious. Her stories are in the class of clever fireworks but, since cleverness is by itself not enough, she puts it to good use. Her constant question is where do men and women go when they have reached the end. The answer may be bleak but there is no doubt about the seriousness of the quest or the authority with which the writer describes it. This is a book that you will want and that you will find rewarding to read and reread.

—The Compulsive Reader

The garden of stories found in Karen Brennan's masterful collection The Garden in Which I Walk is plated like a crazed French topiary of dreams. The forms are all expressionistic edges, fragments and fractures, adhering to the contours of wonder and desire. There are angels in the angles and the topography breaks into the English country park paradox of landscapes—so groomed, so artificial—as to be more natural than nature. This book is a human-made Eden of poetic posed and poised prose.

—Michael Martone

The stories in The Garden in Which I Walk are ten triumphs in a single volume. Karen Brennan's jazz-infused fiction demoniacally crashes us into our delusions, our states of despairing satiation and of happy hungering. No writer since Angela Carter has brought readers such blasphemous, ribald visions of divine justice.

—Kevin McIlvoy, author of Hyssop and The Complete History of New Mexico