The Odditorium
Subtitle
Stories
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.
Bio
Melissa Pritchard is a professor emeritus of English (creative writing) at Arizona State University.
Praise for this book
Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine. … These are stories full of holy living creatures.
San Francisco Chronicle