A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

The author of Mayordomo presents a volume of earthy wisdom and humor that discusses the history and culture of garlic, and his adventures planting in autumn, harvesting in summer, and more. National ad/promo. Tour.

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Crawford, Stanley

Gardening & Landscape Design

Harpercollins

The author of Mayordomo explores the intimacy between a farmer and the earth. Threaded with history and the culture of a plant prized since ancient times, this book examines the mysteries of earth, wind, water, bulb, and seed.

A Garlic Testament : Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

Perennial

First published in 1966, Gascoyne is a hilarious look into a future that looks remarkably like the present. Meet Gascoyne, a man who spends whole weeks in his car, eating, sleeping and conducting his business via mobile phone. Gascoyne has found a new preoccupation―hunting down the killer of his business associate (last seen slithering away from the crime scene in a tree-sloth costume), and finding out how the southern California megalopolis has suddenly slipped out of his grasp.

Crawford, Vernon Gascoyne

Vintage/Ebury (A Division of Random House Group)

Details the adventures of Stanley Crawford, an outsider who was made the steward of an irrigation system in a remote Hispanic village in New Mexico

MAYORDOMO

Biographies & Memoirs

Regional U.S.

Anchor

Irrigation ditches are the lifelines of agriculture and daily life in rural New Mexico. This award-winning account of the author's experience as a mayordomo, or ditch boss, is the first record of the life of an acequia by a community participant.

Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico

Professionals & Academics

University of New Mexico Press

From his New Mexico mountain home, award-winning author Stanley Crawford writes about growing garlic and selling it.
 "To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world."--Stan Crawford

This book is like Stanley Crawford's floor. The floor began more than thirty years ago when Crawford moved his family to New Mexico after selling movie rights to his first novel. The history of their home-made house is written in the hand-plastered floor, patched and sealed over the years. At first a reminder of how little he and his wife knew about working with mud, the floor has become beautiful in the years since 1971. It embodies their lives, the ways things have changed and the ways things have stayed the same. "A mud floor is perfectly sustainable, being infinitely repairable and finally recyclable."
"Reflections in Mud," Crawford's essay about the floor, is one of the many pieces collected in this book about his life in northern New Mexico. The novelist who didn't know how to lay a mud floor is now a seasoned farmer, irrigator, and northern New Mexico villager, and the essays on these subjects that he has been writing since the 1980s continue the work he began in Mayordomo and A Garlic Testament as an articulator of values that are out of synch and out of scale with the suburban lives of most Americans in the twenty-first century. Whether he is writing about the river whose water irrigates his land, the plants and animals with which he lives, or the continuing struggle he and his neighbors must engage in if their small farms and farmers markets are to survive, Crawford's thoughtful, witty essays are the kinds of summing up that his fans have been cutting out of periodicals for years. Now that they are in book form we can all throw away the clippings, reread the essays, and give the book to friends who have yet to discover the pleasure of reading Stanley Crawford.

The River in Winter: New and Selected Essays

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Scotty's family owns a lodge near their silver mine in the Colorado Rockies. Summers at the lodge are idyllic for Scotty and his cousin Mickey. The grown-ups are dealing with the complications of business and adult dysfunction, but the boys are more interested in the complications of puberty, especially when Rosalind, the teenage daughter of family friends, is on hand. To read this quiet, rich evocation of adolescent watchfulness is to experience what it is like to be fourteen years old, waiting for something to happen, aware of everything but oblivious to as much of it as possible. Readers will be reminded of such modern masters as William Maxwell and John Updike.

The Canyon: A Novel

Literary

Some Instructions to My Wife

Dalkey Archive Pr

From "Putting Things Away" to "The Marriage Almanac" (not to mention the pedantic "Index," in itself a comic wonder), Stanley Crawford gives the married, the unmarried, and the formerly married a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. Starting with the complete title, "Some Instructions to My Wife Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood," a boorish narrator sets down some seventy-three pieces of advice to his wife, young son, and two-year-old daughter, intended to foster and maintain domestic tranquility in an age of anxiety. Taken literally, our neo-Victorian head of the house is a male chauvinist pig of sorts, but what reader would deny that the sources of Crawford's satire run deep in the American grain?

Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood (American Literature)

Humor & Satire

Dalkey Archive Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crawford, Stanley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Crawford, Stanley

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Crawford, Stanley. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

A Garlic Testament : Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

Crawford, Vernon Gascoyne

MAYORDOMO

Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico

A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm

The River in Winter: New and Selected Essays

The Canyon: A Novel

Some Instructions to My Wife

Some Instructions to My Wife: Concerning the Upkeep of the House and Marriage, and to My Son and Daughter Concerning the Conduct of Their Childhood (American Literature)