"Emotionally rich." --New York Times

"Ambitious, lush and even thrilling." --Los Angeles Times

"Ripping good yarns." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The stories in this strange and original collection bend genres--horror, mystery, Western--into wondrous new shapes." --O, The Oprah Magazine

In each of...

In these stories by Melissa Pritchard, the past brushes up against the present, the voices of both the sane and the obsessed are heard, and the spirits speaking unbidden through the mouths of some spurn others who desire them most.

Some of the men and women in "Spirit Seizures" dwell contentedly on the surface of life, even making a science or an art of what they see around them. But many of the characters in these stories see--sometimes calmly, sometimes with agitation--beneath life's surface, beyond sun's light. The title story tells of a psychic women, pregnant with her second child,...

In an essay entitled "Spirit and Vision" Melissa Pritchard poses the question: "Why write?" Her answer reverberates throughout A Solemn Pleasure, presenting an undeniable case for both the power of language and the nurturing constancy of the writing life. Whether describing the deeply interior imaginative life required to write fiction,...