Stories of Trees, Woods, and the Forest

My short story The Man Who Harvested Trees (And Gifted Life) is included in an anthology published October 2021 by Everyman’s Library (Penguin Random House).

A beautiful hardcover anthology of stories by a brilliant and surprising mix of classic and contemporary writers who have been inspired by trees.

Sep 07, 2021 | 496 Pages | ISBN 9781841596310 | Edited by Fiona Stafford

A delightful story collection ranging from Ovid to Austen and from Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest (via Thomas Love Peacock’s “Maid Marian”) to Treebeard’s story in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Here are forest-haunted fairy tales both classic (the Brothers Grimm) and inventively retold (Angela Carter), and there is room in these woods for comedy as well as terror, in Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, and Alexander McCall Smith’s “Head Tree.” Here too are notable writers from around the world, including Yuri Olyesha, Jean Giono, Gabriel Hemery, Tove Jansson, Joseph Zobel, Yvonne Vera, Damon Galgut, D. H. Lawrence, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Eudora Welty. From Daphne du Maurier’s “The Apple Tree” to N. K. Narayan’s “Under the Banyan Tree,” the sheer range of tales in these pages will leave readers refreshed and dazzled.