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Publisher Description
So there was all that: the ordinary twill of life; the ho-hum sturm und drang of the workplace: the ubiquitous absurdities, the annoying co-workers, the bloody deadlines and even bloodier bottom lines; the bland, eternal, Sisyphean, absolute, unrelenting, surreal certainty of the day-in-and-day-out of it all. Life as a slice of white bread, moistened with spit and rolled into a messy glob, a doughy ball that couldn’t make the slightest dent in the iron gates of life.
But then, suddenly, on August 27, 2002, all that changed. Suddenly, Rae-Jean’s uneventful life began to leaven and swell with hypotheticals. 'What if' grabbed a hold of it and pumped it a few times in its death grip.
The world in Sara Pritchard's book is a known world and yet a strange place, with a cast of homeless characters who wander in and out of the stories of the collection, all set in the same university town. The linked stories take place during the time when gender discrimination in the American workplace was blatant, and when classified ads were labeled "male" or "female" accordingly.
Sara Pritchard is the author of the novel-in-stories Crackpots, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and the critically acclaimed linked-story collection Lately. She's lived in West Virginia for over thirty years and teaches in the Wilkes University Low-Residency MA/MFA Creative Writing Program.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pritchard (Crackpots) delves into the "ordinary twill of life" in this engrossing new collection of stories chronicling the underemployed and underchallenged of Morgantown, W.Va. In the two-part title story, dead-broke Wendy, who never outgrew the game of dress-up, responds to her lecherous boss, "Little Big Man," by dressing in a series of ludicrous costumes and donning a button that reads, "There's That Smell Again." In "The Old Laughing Lady," Bunny faces the knowledge of her ex-husband's secret family by growing invasive kudzu that engulfs the neighborhood "with the stealth and speed of a virus." Homeless "sojourners," with names like Prophet Zero and the Green Man, serve as a subtle chorus across these stories, shifting in the peripheries of protagonists' lives. Green Man is a pseudonym for 52-year-old Archer, a self-described "urban Thoreau," who secretly lives in the basement of university press copy editor Rae-Jean. Down there, Green Man naps, plays with Rae-Jean's dogs, and reads her books (he's particularly taken with Foucault), until the 18 flea bombs that Rae-Jean sets off one morning blow her house to smithereens. The free associations of Prophet Zero, a "magnificent homespun orator" with a "melodious Barry White" baritone, enter the workplace vernacular of Marcie's office, and worm their way into her office affair. Full of cutting humor and empathy, if occasionally too precious, Pritchard's new collection is a worthy, often very funny read.
