Machiavelli's Lawn | Granta

  • Published: 03/03/2011
  • ISBN: 9781847084927
  • Granta Books
  • 144 pages

Machiavelli’s Lawn

Mark Crick

Twelve great authors offer their top tips on gardening, from Sylvia Plath’s struggles with autumn bulbs, to Pablo Neruda on pruning roses at the end of a romance. In Brecht’s mini opera, a courageous mother’s fight to protect her tender young potatoes from the army reveals the tragic consequences of a crop being harvested too soon. On Zola’s allotment, a striking miner finds more brutal and perilous than anything he imagined at the coalface. Carver’s anti-hero plants up a neglected hanging basket in a doomed attempt to repair his relationship with his wife. And Brett Easton Ellis’s brand-obsessed hero, drawn into the garden by the promise of carnage, finds in horticulture the perfect outlet for his demons. Inspired, botanically accurate and utterly hilarious, Machiavelli’s Lawn will appeal to green-fingered book lovers everywhere.

If you feel your plot or small holding would benefit from Niccolò Machiavelli on The Art of Mowing, Isabelle Allende on Dividing Bamboo or Émile Zola on Weedding by Hand then Machiavelli's Lawn is the book for you

Lindsay Duguid, Times Literary Supplement

Mark Crick's new parodies continues his winning line in household hints from literary bigwigs

Rosemary Goring, Herald

Crick's project is underpinned by a solid knowledge and appreciation of the writers he parodies, as well as of the urbane tasks in which he engages them ... erudite and enjoyable prose, no less rewarding for its horticultural accuracy ... Machiavelli's Lawn is a little ge(r)m of postmodern humour

Thea Lenarduzzi, Times Literary Supplement

The Author

Mark Crick is a photographer and the author of two books of literary pastiche, Kafka’s Soup, Sartre’s Sink and Machiavelli’s Lawn, all published by Granta Books. He lives in London.

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