The Garden in Which I Walk
“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 disturbing but necessary epiphanies for our post-modern lives, revelations filled with scathing poignancy and perceptive melancholy, the kind of dark ineffable melancholy you find in the late poetry of Coleridge or Keats’ late poem, ‘To Autumn.'”
—New Pages
“That rich sense of contentment, there among the ruins that testify to the beautiful mayhem of a beating heart, suffices for Brennan’s characters who in story after story are compelled to acknowledge how experience resists the tidy form of fiction itself. Fictions that remind us what fiction can’t do even as they subtly confirm what it can do–these are marvelous, rewarding reading experiences.”
— English Studies Forum
“The garden of stories found in Karen Brennan’s masterful collection The Garden in Which I Walk are 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 demonically 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