The Orchid Stories

A classic work of American fiction and a masterpiece of eccentric detail. Praised by John Ashbery as evoking “a rococo world of banality and nightmare which . . . comes in the end to seem like paradise.“ The Orchid Stories presents us with interwoven stories as delicate and exquisite as the flowers for which theyâ€re named, conveying an almost otherworldly beauty. Images, moods, and characters recur with the clarity of a Phil, the little boy gigolo; Mummers and Mummy, who “adopt†him; the alluring Diana Vienna; and the eccentric Dr. Schmidlapp, who plans to capture the rare “Native Innards†orchid precisely at the stroke of midnight.