City in a Wild Garden
edited by David Maddox, Malerie Lovejoy, and Curtis Walker

Cheeky monkeys, vertical farms, climate change, and tree tribunals: the second anthology of very short fiction in The Stories of Nature of Cities series offers radical re-imaginings of city life. This year’s volume is a collection of 49 stories from 20 countries that were inspired by the titular phrase, “City in a Wild Garden.” Six prize-winning stories, written by authors from the United States, India, and Brazil, were chosen from over 1000 stories from 101 countries. These six — and 43 more — remarkable stories represent broad artistic imaginings of cities from a multitude of perspectives, written and published during a time of global uncertainty. For this year’s introduction, poet and scholar Kirby Manià offers thoughts on the interaction between gardens, cities, and the human-nature interface to contextualize the vivid relationships illuminated in the storytelling of this collection.