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Glen Allen (Hardcover)
Cary Holladay
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R793
R692
Discovery Miles 6 920
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In these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort
hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader
on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the
community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the
rhythms of rock and roll, The Quick-Change Artist is at once
whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery
of the fantastic. Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the
supernatural--especially in the lives of children coming of
age--offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The
Quick-Change Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in
love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she
works. In "Heaven," set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling
mother and son rely on the support of their fortune-telling plow
horse. The narrator of "Jane's Hat" recalls a childhood enlivened
by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding
beauty everywhere. Horses and the people who love them, wanderers
and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who
search for them: these are stories with a constant heart.
Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short
stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood,
in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. In the title story, two
women in 1850s Virginia marry brothers who promptly uproot them to
follow the Oregon Trail west, until an unexpected shift of
allegiance separates the sisters forever. Elsewhere in the book, a
young boy's kidnapping ignites tensions in a sorority house;
frontier figure Cynthia Ann Parker struggles upon her return to her
birth community from the Comanche people with whom she's lived a
full life; and in a metafictional twist, a gothic tale resonates in
the present. In the novella, "A Thousand Stings," three sisters
come of age in the 1960s over a long summer of small-town scandal
and universal stakes. These are just some of the lives, shaped by
migrations, yearning, and the long shadows of myth, that Holladay
creates. She crafts them with subtle humor, a stunning sense of
place, and an unerring eye for character.
Each of the crystalline worlds Cary Holladay brings us in the short
stories and novella that make up Brides in the Sky has sisterhood,
in all its urgency and peril, at its heart. In the title story, two
women in 1850s Virginia marry brothers who promptly uproot them to
follow the Oregon Trail west, until an unexpected shift of
allegiance separates the sisters forever. Elsewhere in the book, a
young boy's kidnapping ignites tensions in a sorority house;
frontier figure Cynthia Ann Parker struggles upon her return to her
birth community from the Comanche people with whom she's lived a
full life; and in a metafictional twist, a gothic tale resonates in
the present. In the novella, "A Thousand Stings," three sisters
come of age in the 1960s over a long summer of small-town scandal
and universal stakes. These are just some of the lives, shaped by
migrations, yearning, and the long shadows of myth, that Holladay
creates. She crafts them with subtle humor, a stunning sense of
place, and an unerring eye for character.
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