Novels
- Selene of the Spirits (1989)
- Phoenix (1991)
- Late Bloomer (2004)
- Palmerino (2013)
Collections
- Spirit Seizures (1987)
- The American Story (1990)
- The Instinct For Bliss (1995)
- Open City (2000)
- Disappearing Ingenue (2002)
- The Odditorium (2012)
Non fiction
- A Solemn Pleasure (2015)
Novels Book Covers
Collections Book Covers
Non fiction Book Covers
Melissa Pritchard Books Overview
Selene of the Spirits
Set in the romantic world of Victorian London, Selene of the Spirits is the story of a beautiful young woman with psychic powers who acquires sudden fame as a medium in the spiritualist circles of the day. Just as precipitous is Selene fall from grace after the revelation of her love affair with a renowned scientist. Exiled to the Welsh countryside, Selene learns more about the spiritual, and carnal, side of life than she ever had in London, as she is transformed by the fulfillment of her love.
Late Bloomer
The award winning, widely praised author of Disappearing Ingenue is at the top of her form in this witty, wickedly funny novel about a romance writer whose real life begins to outpace the wildest flights of her imagination. After one failed marriage and numerous dating disasters, Prudence True Parker teaches Advanced Personal Journey at a community college in Arizona. Prudence’s own personal journey has led to a mountain of debts, and she is beginning to feel desperate. Salvation comes at the local library, where she meets Digby Deeds alias Mildred Crawley, the author of the Savage Passion romance series. Nearing the end of his life, Digby is looking for someone to keep Savage Passion alive and offers Prudence the final forty plots of the wildly popular series. Moved more by financial desperation than literary aspiration, she reluctantly accepts the bequest. Just after taking on the project, Prudence s friendly local psychic foresees the arrival of a romantic stranger in her life. The prediction comes true with startling speed: At a Native American charity event in Oklahoma, Prudence is swept off her feet by a mysterious young Comanche artist, Ray Chasing Hawk. A month later, Ray shows up on her doorstep. Fired by the irresistible desires their affair awakens, Prudence begins writing her first Native American romance. Real life gives her plenty of inspiration for her fictional plot and her home fills to overflowing with visitors, including Native American activists, medicine men, and wolves. In a hilarious, totally satisfying conclusion, the pieces of her life fall into place at the annual Romance Writers Convention in Houston, Texas. Smartly written and laugh out loud funny, Late Bloomer is a high spirited tale of romance, captivity, and savage love women of all ages will relish. www. doubleday. com
Disappearing Ingenue
The ups and downs and turnarounds of a good girl who can t help being bad no matter how hard she tries come hilariously to life in these disarming, utterly distinctive interrelated stories. Eleanor Stoddard tries to lead an exemplary life, to pursue the high road, and better herself and the world, but somehow things keep going awry. In Port de Bras, even as Eleanor spends her summer reading about the Holocaust, her good intentions are disrupted by the discovery that her first best friend is a compulsive liar who has cried wolf too many times. Salve Regina wryly captures another ill fated step on Eleanor’s journey toward goodness. When, much to her mother s dismay, she dreams of becoming a nun and dutifully says her rosary in the bathroom at her first cotillion, Eleanor finds that she still can t save a friend from the consequences of her first seduction. Her marriage brings no relief from the twists of fate and her quirky attempts to deal with them: In The Case of the Disappearing Ingenue, Eleanor turns to Nancy Drew for help when she suspects that her husband may be cheating on her. In the Pushcart Prize winning Funktionslust, the final story in this collection, Eleanor does get her childhood wish…
but not exactly in the way she imagined. Traveling through Central America with a rescued laboratory gorilla, Like a rogue saint, Eleanor Stoddard was sighted here and there, most often by the innocent. Disappearing Ingenue presents a hero*ine whose adventures with life and love are wildly imaginative.
The Odditorium
An O, The Oprah Magazine Title to Pick Up Now & Oprah. com Book of the Week 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 two 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.
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