Readers who care about preserving local American businesses will appreciate this new book by novelist and garlic farm owner Stanley Crawford. In the fall of 2014, Crawford questioned the U.S. Commerce Department’s granting of an exemption of duties to the largest importer of Chinese garlic, setting off a massive legal battle in which his small farm in New Mexico has been pitted against the Chinese importer and its several international law firms. In this compelling account of his David and Goliath battle, now in its fifth year, Crawford describes his personal and farming life under a cloud of lawsuits and administrative skirmishes. The unusual case was of such interest that it became the subject of a Netflix documentary, “Garlic Breath,” in the six-part series Rotten, released in 2018.

PRAISE for The Garlic Papers

“Every tenderfoot city-bred person like myself would benefit by reading . . . The Garlic Papers . . . if only to get the feel of how many skills and tools and thoughts are necessary to work even a two-acre garlic farm beside a small river in northern New Mexico. . . . The Garlic Papers’ account is vivid, entertaining, revealing, . . .”
―MICHAEL VENTURA, novelist, screenwriter, film director, essayist and cultural critic

“The Garlic Papers is as important in our time as the personally much less communal Thoreau’s work in his. Uniquely distinguished in America as both writer and farmer, Stanley Crawford answers a bizarre and atrocious legal attack with a pointed defense yet also with the fullness of his long life evoked in everyday detail here by the particular fight for justice against lies and betrayal undermining fair competition.”
―JOSEPH MCELROY, author of The Smuggler’s Bible, Lookout Cartridge, Women and Men, and six other novels

“Superb. A remarkable achievement.”
―VERLYN KLINKENBORG, author and former member of the New York Times editorial board, whose opinion column, “The Rural Times,” appeared in the newspaper for sixteen years.