Search results for ""author melissa pritchard""

O, The Oprah Magazine "Title to Pick Up Now" & Oprah.com Book of the Week San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year Library Journal Best Stories Collection of the Year "Emotionally rich." --New York Times "Ambitious, lush and even thrilling." --Los Angeles Times "Ripping good yarns." --Minneapolis Star Tribune "The stories in this strange and original collection bend genres--horror, mystery, Western--into wondrous new shapes." --O, The Oprah Magazine In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley's "odditoriums" to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert powerful forces upon human consciousness. Melissa Pritchard is a Flannery O'Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg award-winning author whose previous short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editors' Choice selections. She lives in Arizona.

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O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now” American Library Association “Over the Rainbow List” selection Welcome to Palmerino, the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court. In imagining the real life of this brilliant, lesbian polymath known for her chilling supernatural stories, Melissa Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which the dead writer inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer. Positing the art of biography as an act of resurrection and possession, this novel brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals—Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson—who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression. Melissa Pritchard is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Odditorium, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Among other honors, her books have received the Flannery O'Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg awards, and two of her short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice selections.

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Essays in this collection have been recently and prominently published: “Still God Helps You: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave,” first published in Wilson Quarterly (2013), was a Byliner exclusive, recognized by The Atlantic as one of the year’s “Fantastic Pieces of Journalism,” and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Circle of Friends” was published in Amtrak’s Arrive magazine (July/August 2014). “A Solemn Pleasure” appeared in the David Shields/Bradford Morrow anthology The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death. “Finding Ashton” and an excerpt from “Doxology” appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. Melissa Pritchard is a prolific writer whose fiction and nonfiction has been anthologized in over fifteen books and appeared in over sixty literary journals. She is also an award-winning teacher of creative writing at Arizona State University, and has amassed a devoted following among her students. Pritchard’s extraordinary storytelling skills, developed as a fiction writer, lend themselves perfectly to conveying the stories of her travels, spiritual pursuits, historical research, and empathy for the people who have crossed her path. Inaugural book in Bellevue Literary Press’ new The Art of the Essay series, with a Foreword by bestselling novelist and Harvard University Director of Creative Writing Bret Anthony Johnston.

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