Lushly immersive stories exploring the ties that bind women together
“Melissa Pritchard, expert in the short story form, writes toward big questions and big ideas—class, beauty, friendship, and the weight of familial expectation and disappointment—yet every piece in The Carnation Milk Palace is rendered with so much heart.”—Ramona Ausubel, author of Awayland and The Last Animal
“A stunning collection from one of our country’s most gifted short story writers. Written with emotional acuity, these stories are filled with tremendous compassion, psychological complexity, and spiritual grace. We see characters in the midst of journeys both literal and figurative, confronting the pasts that haunt them, the secrets buried in their family histories, all while navigating the challenging terrain of their current lives. There are few writers today who write with as much technical mastery and elegance or who understand the human condition as deeply as Melissa Pritchard.”—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared and The Imagined Life
Among these eleven acclaimed stories, readers will witness a young girl’s coming of age in 1960s California on New Year’s Eve; a woman scooping honeybees from her Phoenix pool as she awaits news of her husband, deployed in Iraq; a divorcée and her daughters visiting their grandmother in Hawaii ahead of a deadly tsunami; aging sisters whose secrets are revealed on holiday in Vienna; a delightfully tipsy game of croquet on Mother’s Day; a family trying to hold itself together over Christmas as the war in Vietnam divides the country; and the naïve Mrs. Wisdom, whose first grandchild ushers in a lifting of the veil between Halloween and Thanksgiving.
Leavened by humor and the many forms of love, The Carnation Milk Palace is a moving, evocative tribute to women at all stages of their lives and to the overriding power of forgiveness, selflessness, resilience, and the lasting, fractured sweetness of memory.
More Praise for The Carnation Milk Palace
“The Carnation Milk Palace is an expansive, exquisitely written collection exploring longing, motherhood, friendship, and marriage. Pritchard creates characters and renders feeling with a precision I’ve never quite seen; she is a master storyteller.” —Karen E. Bender, author of Refund and The Words of Dr. L
“The level of detail . . . is staggering. Melissa Pritchard is able to evoke whole other novels in just a few sentences.” —actor Patton Oswalt on “The Carnation Milk Palace”
Melissa Pritchard on The Carnation Milk Palace
For me, writing stories is about responding to obsession. Some of the stories in The Carnation Milk Palace, like “City of Paris,” are acts of exorcism, releasing hidden wounds. Some of the stories, like “Tsunami,” look at the impact of political or natural events on personal lives, others, like “Rose Ivoire” or “Flat Shoals,” originate from my fascination with a particular subject, place, or time. “Croquet” is a tribute to my mother and our last Mother’s Day together. To reveal emotional truths, home truths, through storytelling is crucial to my writing.
The eleven stories in this collection began with this question: if I only had one story left to write before I died, what would that story be? Mortal focus, for me, is an infallible method of discernment. Asking myself that single question narrows the field, frees me to acknowledge the obsession haunting me, to hear the heart’s truth and dismiss the mind’s endless, egoistic chatter. Each story is a result of listening to a specific need, in that moment, to heal a wound, pay tribute, or better understand timeless yet generational questions of aging, sexuality, death, grieving, the constricting yet solacing bonds of family, marriage, and friendship.
Above all, the stories in The Carnation Milk Palace seek to bear imperfect witness to life’s innate resilience and the quietly restorative, at times miraculous, power of love. They are reminders that humor often serves to make the unjust just, the unbearable bearable. They are reminders to remain open to love, even celebration, in the midst of cumulative loss. They are imprints of the human soul upon the page.
Select Praise for Melissa Pritchard
“Pritchard is one of our finest writers.” —Annie Dillard
“[Pritchard has an] exquisite ear for tone and detail in story, [the] gift of mystic perception, and [a] sense of the historic layering of human lives and the events that make our lives absolutely distinct.” —Joy Harjo
“Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.” —Leslie Jamison, San Francisco Chronicle
“Pritchard’s voice is completely her own and her characters are as unique, wild and magical as she is.” —Tayari Jones
“A writer at the height of her powers.” —Oprah.com
“Emotionally rich.” —New York Times
“The singularity of [Pritchard’s] narrators remains indelible.” —Washington Post
“[Pritchard] takes risks . . . Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back.” —Los Angeles Times