The Odditorium Stories

New Mexico-Arizona Book Award Finalist
"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
"IMAGE: Art, Faith Mystery" Top Ten of the Year
"Largehearted Boy" Favorite Short Story Collection of the Year "Emotionally rich." --"New York Times" "Weird and wonder-filled." --"Albuquerque Journal" "Display[s] the whimsy and intelligence of a writer at the height of her powers." --"Oprah.com" "Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine. . . . These are stories full of holy living creatures." --"San Francisco Chronicle" "Melissa Pritchard's aptly titled "The Odditorium" considers the inner lives of the strange, the damaged and the forgotten . . . with its zest for the macabre and its time-spanning imaginative appetite . . . the singularity of her narrators remains indelible [and] shows that fiction still has the ability to shock and surprise." --"Washington Post" "[Pritchard] takes risks, different risks in different stories. Can she write a segment in the form of a comedic Shakespearean dialogue? She can. Does a story evolve into epistolary form? It does. Will she be able to build a story around the format of an old newspaper feature? She will. Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back. Is Melissa Pritchard someone whose short fiction should be well known? Do you even have to ask?" --"Los Angeles Times" "Pritchard's exuberant prose is perfectly suited to carry the antic freight of these often bizarre, always cerebral stories. . . . This is a fulsome compendium of ripping good yarns." --Minneapolis "Star Tribune" "Any great writer does many things at once, of course, but most lead with a particular strength. And then there is Pritchard, who simply turns all the dials up to eleven. In ["The Odditorium"], more than in previous works, histo