Melissa Pritchard

"A writer at the height of her powers." ―Oprah.com

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

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"In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard presents an undeniable case for both the power of language and the nurturing constancy of the writing life. This is nonfiction vividly engaged with the world, encompassing the author's journeys into the deeply interior imaginative life required to write fiction, a search for the lost legacy of American literature as embodied by Walt Whitman, reports from Afghanistan while embedded with a young female GI, tales...

A 19th century English romance between a woman spiritualist and a scientist investigating her powers. She is Selene, a poor but ambitious woman whose powers are sometimes true and sometimes not, and she seduces Sir William Herapath who is married.