Spirit
Seizures
by Melissa Pritchard
Winner of the Flannery
O'Connor Award for Short Fiction
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A New York Times Editor's Choice Book
University
of Georgia Press
Athens, GA 1987
Hardcover
An auspicious debut, Spirit Seizures introduces a new writer with a unique vision of the longings suppressed by all men and women. Like Flannery O'Connor's characters, Melissa Pritchard's people are restless souls and questing spirits caught up in the odd, ironic, and often cruel dilemmas of modern life. Here the past brushes up against the present, the voices of both the sane and the obsessed are heard, and the spirits speaking through the mouths of some spurn others who desire them most. Written with humor, but poignant when they reveal the passions and premonitions we rarely articulate, the stories in Spirit Seizures follow the elusive currents that link us to the eternal, and the fluid boundaries that wash between love and mourning.
"These are powerful, jolting stories."
—Annie Dillard
"This first collection, of seventeen stories, is
the most recent winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction,
and it could scarcely be more appropriate. . . . It is a promising short-story
writer who can set such neatly timed, nicely placed traps for the reader.
Click."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Supple, intense and genuine. . . . Pritchard makes
her characters come alive."
--Providence Sunday Journal
"Pritchard possesses a gift for depicting diverse
characters, times, and locales. . . . Only through self-analysis, and
undergoing a jolting experience, do these women, and men, transcend their
pain."
--Ms.