Three years of liv­ing in ver­dant South­ern Cal­i­for­nia inspired the writer Bar­bara Klein Moss to con­jure con­tem­po­rary man­i­fes­ta­tions of Eden. Fol­low­ing the idea of a per­son­al par­adise, Moss cre­ates in this stun­ning col­lec­tion char­ac­ters who live, in some way, in lit­tle Edens of their own mak­ing that are some­times more sus­tain­ing and sat­is­fy­ing than life as it presents itself each day. Imag­i­na­tion fre­quent­ly tri­umphs over real­i­ty, a point under­lined by Moss’ cre­ative pow­er in telling these thought-pro­vok­ing sto­ries of won­der and tense longing. 

“Rug Weaver,” the open­ing sto­ry, quick­ly spells out the theme. An Iran­ian rug deal­er— a schol­ar of the Jew­ish sages and mys­tics— finds him­self in South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, sur­round­ed by lush veg­e­ta­tion and expans­es of firm, tanned flesh, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the per­son of Kim­ber­ly, his improb­a­ble blond daugh­ter-in-law. To escape this earth­ly par­adise, he takes refuge in the dark­ness of his apart­ment in his son’s house, where he can once again weave in his mind the intri­cate rug, depict­ing Par­adise, that he had cre­at­ed in his prison cell in Iran. To live, he wove, and the rug became his life. Now, as he half steps back into liv­ing, some­what lured by Kimberly’s inno­cent naked­ness of mind and body, he waits for his unfin­ished rug to come back and sat­is­fac­tion to return. 

California’s man­u­fac­tured par­adis­es pro­vide the set­ting for Lit­tle Edens, the title sto­ry. After the death of their only son, an archi­tect who died of AIDS, Myra and Rus­sell Calvert move from their antique-filled New Eng­land home to South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. Tour­ing the self-con­tained theme con­do com­mu­ni­ties — ​”lit­tle Edens” in Myra’s mind — becomes their enter­tain­ment. But Myra’s Eden is the resump­tion of her inti­mate life with her son, with whom she reg­u­lar­ly vis­its in this new coun­try — a man­made vision of heav­en — and where some­what unex­pect­ed­ly she and her hus­band come to know each oth­er. The novel­la ​“The Palm Tree of Dilys Cath­cart” also takes place in Cal­i­for­nia, bring­ing togeth­er an expa­tri­ate Eng­lish church organ­ist and an Ortho­dox butch­er trans­plant­ed from New York. She and he, this unlike­ly pair, in this unlike­ly set­ting, play out an intense and unspo­ken rela­tion­ship as she tran­scribes and they sing togeth­er music inex­plic­a­bly born in the butcher’s mind. 

Eden is, of course, not with­out its per­ils. In ​“The Inter­preters” a young woman work­ing as an actor in a liv­ing his­to­ry muse­um is trapped in a real-life Eden and envi­sions her escape. In ​“The Con­so­la­tions of Art” an earth-bound daugh­ter destroys the Eden of her aging father when she capri­cious­ly fires the young woman she had hired to do a bit of house­keep­ing for him. Ten­sion and sen­su­al­i­ty rip­ple through these sto­ries; the for­bid­den fruit and the tempter lurk in these lit­tle Edens, as in the pri­mal Eden, with the con­se­quences that knowl­edge may bring. 

A rich­ly con­ceived and exe­cut­ed short sto­ry is a small trea­sure. These lush sto­ries are a store­house of trea­sures, mak­ing the read­er tin­gle with the plea­sure of a vibrant imag­i­na­tion at work and at play.