The Odditorium
Stories
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A writer at the height of her powers.” ―Oprah.com
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 the author of the novel Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, among other books. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she now lives in Columbus, Georgia.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pritchard, author of Spirit Seizures for which she won the Flannery O'Connor Award certainly can't be accused of false advertising with her selected title for this collection of eight off-beat short stories that are likely to be an acquired taste. The order of the tales may work against her, as she starts with "Pelagia, Holy Fool," an account of a woman described as a "scoundrel-saint," who lived during the time of Tsar Alexander I, and who "flipped a convent full of pent-up, quarrelsome women on its head and put up with having her vile, unwashed feet kissed by a failing empire of wonder-struck pilgrims." That summary either grips, or doesn't, and for those in the latter category, much of the rest of the book is likely to be rough sledding. Only a handful, most notably, "Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Hospital," the volume's standout, are traditionally-told stories; that entry, set in 1944 in a ghost-ridden southern England hospital designated to receive casualties after D-Day, is atmospheric, enigmatic, and moving.
