Even the safe harbor of an ordinary house garden is transformed into bewildering, uncharted territory in VEronique Bizots critically acclaimed short story collection Gardeners. If the poet Mahmoud Darwish once observed that [t]here is nothing left of us in the wilderness save what the wilderness kept for itself, so too, in the apartments, backyards, and hotel lobbies that are the settings for VEronique Bizots sober, fabulist tales, it is domestic life that constitutes the truly wild terrains, in which we may yet barely survive. A man returns home after decades abroad, only to find that a phalanx of gardeners have massacred the treasured chaos of the land he once knew. Three siblings repair to an abandoned country estate after gambling debts have left them in ruin, but the neighbors they encounter there prove more menacing than the urban cutthroats they left behind. A retired archeologist vacationing at a posh resort in Portugal is thrust back into troubled memories of her past life, by an invasion of possibly imaginary rats. These and three other stories comprise Bizots subtle and strange, tender and terrifying collection of stories. Celebrated in France for her dangerously straightforward, lyrically troublesome prose, Bizot has written six tales full of the alien monstrosities of ordinary life, where the quotidian rhythms of sibling squabbles, home maintenance, and friendly encounters with neighbors skim thinly over undercurrents of murderous intents. Everyday life is the palette from which she draws to paint portraits of loneliness, greed, jealousy, and despair, but with such a subtle touch that we find ourselves laughing at her sharp wit before falling under the spell of the extraordinarily bizarre and compelling universe that her characters inhabit. Under her masterful hand, the banal gestures of our living serve not only to survive but to construct a wondrous and unpredictable world--a world in which most gardens are full of corpses.

Praise for Gardeners and VEronique Bizot

Gardeners is a wild and unrelenting chorus of voices that thrilled me and terrified me in equal measure.
--Catherine Lacey, author of The Answers and Nobody Is Ever Missing

If you are a short story junkie--if you are a literary adventurer of any kind, really--you need VEronique Bizots Gardeners. Each tale is unique, and utterly surprising at every turn. Bizots characters, and their voices, will be with me for a long time.
--Nicholas Mainieri, author of The Infinite

Gardeners is a captivating, hypnotic collection, thought-provoking and thick with the flavors of Beckett and Poe. I loved it, and carry the stories with me.
--Bill Loehfelm, author of Let the Devil Out

VEronique Bizot is a marvel. Her Gardeners is richly detailed--vivid, wild and beguiling without the starkness of much French experimental fiction. The unsettling air of these stories grows thicker as you move from one to the next. And Youna Kwak is a translator to keep your eye on. She has translated Bizots stylized narrative with flair, offering a lean, expectant and yet deceptively simple prose--perfect for this collection.
--Peter Thompson, author of Winter Light

Not only is there an importance and influence of place in Bizots stories, but, arguably even more essential, a confluence of the interiority of the place and the interiority of human existence.
--Adam Braver, author of November 22, 1963 and The Disappeared

About the Author

Veronique Bizot, author of Gardeners, is a critically acclaimed writer of short stories and novels. She has been awarded numerous literary awards in her home country of France, including the France-Quebec Marie-Claire Blais Prize (2012), the SACD Grand Prix du Roman (2010 and 2012), the Prix du Style (2011), and the Lilas Prize (2010). Her stories and novels have been widely praised for her singular voice and sensibility, at once strangely tender, darkly humorous, and hauntingly lyrical-a reflection of her self-diagnosis as a basically nice person who is burdened by the awareness of the worst aspects of humanity. In addition to Gardeners, her books include the short story collection Les Sangliers (The Wild Boars) and the novels Mon couronnement (My Award), Un Avenir (A Future), Ame qui vive (Soul on the Lookout), and Une ile (An Island). As her first English translation, Gardeners represents Bizots long-awaited introduction to Anglophone readers.