Lately [Paperback]

Sara Pritchard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2, 2007

In this deliciously heart-rending collection, eleven interconnected stories present women and men whose lives have been influenced by Bob Dylan and Vietnam, childhood accidents and family mysteries. When two sisters throw a divorce party, it's a Martha Stewart vision gone haywire. A coed in the late 1960s muddles through an unplanned pregnancy while the father is missing in action. A vacationer thinks she sees her late father on a transatlantic flight. With charming prose, offbeat characters, and emotional depth, Sara Pritchard illuminates our defining moments.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set somewhere in the Mid-Atlantic region ("Pennsy-hi-o") and featuring characters from a disconnected family, these 11 stories from Pritchard(Crackpots) are well-calibrated forays into unwieldy moments of decision. "The Pink Motel" begins with the adult narrator's assertion that while in Florence the year before, she began thinking of becoming a Roman Catholic, then quickly segues into her memory of losing her father, who literally vanished from their Zanesville, Ohio, house: his disappearance prompts her lifelong pursuit to reinvent herself (the Catholicism just being the latest example). In "The Wonders of the World," elderly father Reggie is still physically sickened by the loss of his peace-activist daughter, Faye, killed in a freak explosion years before leaving Reggie only his glib, prosperous, unlovable son, Albert (and Albert's new family) to visit on holidays. "The Honor of Your Presence" builds up to a zany, after-26-years-of-marriage divorce party for the narrator's aphasic sister, Maggie, prompting all kinds of sweet and sour memories; while "Late October, Early April" delineates the poignant ramifications a generation later of a mother's prescribed use of the fetus-harming drug thalidomide. The title story's narrator is a middle-aged, twice-married woman resigned to watching her daughter make the same mistakes she did. Pritchard's shutter-click views of her characters capture their messy human lives with a sometimes startling clarity.
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Review

"[Pritchard's] stories are like marzipan: dense with flavor and beautifully wrought . . . Lately demands to be savored." --Karen Karbo Entertainment Weekly

"[Pritchard] displays the grace and clarity of , say, Anne Tyler or even Alice Munro. But the truth is, Pritchard has a marvelous style all her own. She displays compassion and off-kilter humor in equal doses." Los Angeles Times

"[A] lovely collection . . . The full bittersweet spectrum of Pritchard's narrative imagination is perhaps most charmingly displayed in "The Honor of Your Presence," as two sisters throw a divorce party at which, amazingly and against daunting odds, a rollicking good time is had by all." -- Amanda Heller Boston Globe

"Lately has all the elements that enchanted readers of Crackpots. Beautiful sentences, artful storytelling, a wickedly original voice, and, of course, unforgettable crackpots. Pritchard has perfect comic pitch, intelligence to burn, and writes the finest metaphors of any fiction writer I know." -- Sigrid Nunez, author of A Feather on the Breath of God and The Last of Her Kind

"Sara Pritchard's writing is so astonishing and delightful that these stories, if they fancied, could run away and join the circus. Lately is one of the most incandescent and tornadic collections I have ever read. Pure white magic. I bow at the clicking ruby slippers of Sara Pritchard." -- Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Worthy

"The stories in Lately have a lovely strangeness. They’re full of  bright homely details and random events, desertions and disappearances, and their conclusions rise to praise the quirky human capacity for reinvention. A book of rare and fresh originality." -- Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven

"A dazzlingly original voice." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Sara Pritchard is the real deal. With precision and humor, she creates worlds the reader enters with effortless grace, never wanting to leave or interrupt the proceedings. I can think of no other writer who can take you from the hills of West Virginia to the train tracks of Morocco with such style and grace. More, Sara! More!" -- Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Big Stone Gap and Lucia, Lucia

"Lately is such a moving and funny collection that reading it makes my heart ache. I would follow Pritchard and her characters anywhere just to hear what they had to say." --Vendela Vida, author of And Now You Can Go and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

"Lately, Sara Pritchard’s unforgettable linked stories, reads like a love-letter to the hysterical juxtapositions, absurd misses, and lost opportunities of the world. The book is funny, sad, irreverent, and dead-on; one that shouldn’t be missed." -- Kate Walbert, author of Our Kind

"Lately is a page-turner, a collaged Valentine of a book, and Sara Pritchard is a genius. She embraces her characters' eccentricities -- in youth, in middle and old age, and at the threshold of death -- with wit, compassion, inventive surrealism, and a deeply realistic insight. Pritchard knows the secrets of both life and death and reveals them with a delightfully addictive insouciance. This is a book to fall in love with, and to read over and over." -- Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile

"Each of the 11 stories in the unsettling collection stands elegantly on its own, but collectively they branch out and intertwine with each other." Columbus Dispatch

"Pritchard's trademark, often irreverent humor bubbles to the surface over and over again . . . Masterfully done, short stories impart whole chapters' worth of insight into a few brilliantly honed sentences. Pritchard proves she is a worthy contender in both the novel form and its concentrated cousin. Highly recommended." Library Journal Starred

"Well-calibrated forays into unwieldy moments of decision . . . . Pritchard's shutter-click views of her characters capture their messy human lives with a sometimes startling clarity." Publishers Weekly

"These subtly linked 11 stories give dignity to characters whose quirky secret natures are often overlooked. . . .While exploring issues of self- and re-invention, of rootedness and disconnection, Pritchard brings her characters deeply and movingly to life." Kirkus Reviews

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (January 2, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618610049
• ISBN-13: 978-0618610044
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,583,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

SARA PRITCHARD is the author of the novel CRACKPOTS, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year 2003, and the linked-story collection LATELY. Her stories and essays have been published in numerous literary journals, including GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW, NEW LETTERS, ARTS & LETTERS, TUSCULUM REVIEW, CHATTAHOOCHEE REVIEW, NORTHWEST REVIEW, BELLINGHAM REIVEW, and elsewhere. Sara's awards include the Bakeless Prize for Fiction in 2002 for CRACKPOTS, the Alexander Cappon Award for Fiction 2008, and a 2009 Pushcart Prize for her story "Two Studies in Entropy." Sara's new story collection, HELP WANTED: FEMALE, will be published by Etruscan Press in 2012/2013. She lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and teaches in the Wilkes University Low-Residency MA/MFA Creative Writing Program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Try to put this book down. Go ahead. I dare you., February 15, 2007

By 

Stacey Elza (Morgantown, WV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lately (Paperback)

Trying to read just one of the stories from "Lately" before going to bed is a lot like trying to eat just one Oreo cookie. You end up saying, "I'll read one more," and, "OK, just one more and then I'm going to sleep," and, "Seriously, just one more and that is it." Next thing you know, it's 3 a.m., you've gutted the whole book, and the prose is so rich you wish it could go on forever. From the creepiness of "A Winter's Tale" to the ebullience of "La Vecchietta in Siena," "Lately" is a treat from beginning to end.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Will Take Hold Of You!, November 29, 2007

By 

Dancing Deirdre (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lately (Paperback)

I read Lately once and liked it lots. Then I decided to "review" some of its stories again. Then, I noticed in some promotional blurbs on the book that the stories were "linked." I had somehow read the stories twice and not grasped that, although sometimes there was a ring of familiarity from story to story. Then, (or lately?) I got compulsive for the first time in my entire life as a reader-author-mother-whatever. I had an overwhelming urge to chart each of the characters in the stories and see how they all linked together! So I read the book a third time and listed all the characters in each story with the aid of a 6-year-old little girl here in County Sligo, Ireland, who is learning to read. She loved it when she recognized a name in one of the stories. Then, we color coded all the names and had a great time connecting the dots. Then, because some of these great little stories mentioned other authors, I was compelled to find them too and read some wonderful authors I might not otherwise have found had I not become such a "Lately-a-lite." In short, this Lately collection is amazing. It kind of ran me for awhile but that's o.k.! It was a great ride! My compulsion continues-I will have to read it yet again to make sure I did not miss a link!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the BEST authors no one's heard of, September 28, 2007

By 

M. E. Rivera (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lately (Paperback)

I'm not gonna lie to you, I was more than a little skeptical when I picked up Lately. The cover sports a dog in a picture frame. A Lassie dog. It's not about dogs so I thought, well that's random. Then I turned to the first page. Pritchard begins this collection of 11 loosely linked stories with the line, "Full moon, first snow sticking to the pavement like confectioners' sugar on a jelly doughnut." Her use of such beautiful and unexpected language is one reason the book compels you to read just one more story, even though it's 1 a.m., even though you know you have a test tomorrow, even though you know the only thing you should do is turn off the light and go to sleep. But the thing is you have to read one more because the last story was just so good and you already read the first line of the next one and how can you stop now?
Pritchard imbibes each of her stories with her own unique voice, which is quick to point out the humor in tragedy while not sentimentalizing nor downplaying the sadness of a moment. I literally laughed out loud while reading some of these stories. In particular the fourth story, "The Honor of Your Presence," about a woman throwing a divorce party with the help of her sister and a friend who is an avid collector of paint by number paintings of Da Vinci's the last supper (he has 137 of them.) The best part of Pritchard's stories is that they feel real. Some might say her characters are a little too over the top and overtly quirky, but inside aren't we all really? Her use of characters that are anything but run off the mill, her slightly skewed sense of humor, and her ability to bring out the significance of the most mundane moment are what kept me and will hopefully keep you turning the page, even if it is 1 a.m.