short stories
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In 12 stories previously published in the Paris Review and other journals, Pritchard explores the efforts of a cast of troubled, mostly Southwestern, middle-class characters to satisfy an "instinct" for salvation. These heady, occasionally contrived, pieces pivot on questions of both Christian and non-Western spirituality as well as the lawlessness of the creative spirit. "Eating for Theodora" tells of an anorexic adolescent who finds the will to eat only through the intervention of her earthy, mystical Latina neighbor. "The Good and Faithful Widow" is a lonely woman's cerebral, self-analytical account of her anxious relationship with her 14-year-old daughter. In the title story, an idealistic divorcee takes her teenaged daughter-whose "slide from innocence" includes a tattoo, a shaved head and an arrest for shoplifting-to a weaving workshop for women on a Navajo reservation. Pritchard's prose ranges from the simple to the baroque, with her more precious passages ("In a dark cheat of sleep, their incorrupt, guileless hunger lifts Saint Teresa in a minor elevation above the dancer's arching spine, splitting, radiant, into wings") often less stirring than understated ones. Always, though, Pritchard holds the reader's interest as she strives to evoke the complexities of the ineffable.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Vitality passes like a torch through such stories.... Her stories read as exercises in creative writing: smart, but heavy-handed. -- The New York Times Book Review, Nina Snenberb
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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More About the Author
Melissa Pritchard is an award-winning short story writer, novelist, essayist and journalist. The author of seven books of fiction and one biography, she has received numerous awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award,and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has been frequently anthologized and cited in The Pushcart Prize, Prize Stories: The O.Henry Award, Best American Short Stories and numerous other anthologies. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Howard Foundation Fellowship at Brown University, the Hawthornden Foundation, Midlothian Scotland, and the Bogliasco Foundation, Liguria, Italy. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in journals and magazines such as O, The Oprah Magazine, the Nation, The New York Times,Chicago Tribune,The Paris Review, Conjunctions, Ecotone, A Public Space, Agni, The Southern Review and The Gettysburg Review. Two of her books have been New York Times Notable Books, one was selected as a Chicago Tribune Best Books, another as a Barnes and Noble 'Discover Great New Writers' selection. National Public Radio chose one of her collections for their Annual Summer Reading List, and she has served as a judge for both the Flannery O'Connor Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her collection, The Odditorium, was one of "Ten Books to Pick Up Now," in the O, The Oprah Magazine's January, 2012 issue, and was an Oprah Winfrey "Book of the Week" selection in January, 2012. A founder of the Sr. Airman Ashton Goodman Fund, benefiting the Afghan Women's Writing Project www.awwproject.org, Melissa teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Her personal website is www.melissapritchard.com
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Every aspiring writer should read this book. Ms. Pritchard's characters are weird, hilarious and real. Each story is so powerfully written that reading them one cannot help but comment on her writing style and envy her great talent.
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