"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 Editor's Choice selections. She has also been an embedded journalist in Afghanistan and is member of the Afghan Women's Writing Project, which helps to promote literacy and education for Afghan women and girls. She lives in Arizona.

In these stories by Melissa Pritchard, the past brushes up against the present, the voices of both the sane and the obsessed are heard, and the spirits speaking unbidden through the mouths of some spurn others who desire them most.

Some of the men and women in "Spirit Seizures" dwell contentedly on the surface of life, even making a science or an art of what they see around them. But many of the characters in these stories see--sometimes calmly, sometimes with agitation--beneath life's surface, beyond sun's light. The title story tells of a psychic women, pregnant with her second child, who welcomes over her farmer husband's objections the visits of an older couple desiring a seance with the spirit of their dead daughter. Spirits are also summoned in "Rocking on Water, Floating in Glass," when a woman consults the shade of Sarah Bernhardt to help her decide whether to leave her refuge in a dark antique shop and reenter the world of the living.

The husband in "Ramon; Souvenirs" recalls his wife's obsession with pueblo culture and her ambitious courtship of the impotent Indian elder who she hopes will initiate her into native spiritual mysteries. But the greatest desire of La Bete, a spectacularly obese model painted by the French impressionists, is to herself become a perfect object, viewed and adored for her form, not her crude essence. Mrs. Grant in "With Wings Cross Water" is painfully isolated from the surface of her family's life by her fears of terminal illness, of what lies beneath her skin. And Mrs. Gump, the reverend's housekeeper, prays and cleans the house furiously, hoping to obliterate all traces of the worldly beauty that distracts her employer and her artist son from the hereafter.

Written with humor but often poignant when they reveal the veins of longing that run through men and women, the stories in "Spirit Seizures" follow the elusive currents that link us to the eternal, the fluid boundaries that wash between love and mourning.