Lately - by Sara Pritchard (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

In this deliciously heart-rending collection, eleven interconnected stories present women and men whose lives have been influenced by Bob Dylan and Vietnam, childhood accidents and family mysteries. When two sisters throw a divorce party, it's a Martha Stewart vision gone haywire. A coed in the late 1960s muddles through an unplanned pregnancy while the father is missing in action. A vacationer thinks she sees her late father on a transatlantic flight. With charming prose, offbeat characters, and emotional depth, Sara Pritchard illuminates our defining moments.

Review Quotes

"[Pritchard's] stories are like marzipan: dense with flavor and beautifully wrought . . . Lately demands to be savored." --Karen Karbo Entertainment Weekly

"[Pritchard] displays the grace and clarity of, say, Anne Tyler or even Alice Munro. But the truth is, Pritchard has a marvelous style all her own. She displays compassion and off-kilter humor in equal doses." Los Angeles Times

"[A] lovely collection . . . The full bittersweet spectrum of Pritchard's narrative imagination is perhaps most charmingly displayed in "The Honor of Your Presence," as two sisters throw a divorce party at which, amazingly and against daunting odds, a rollicking good time is had by all." -- Amanda Heller Boston Globe

"Lately has all the elements that enchanted readers of Crackpots. Beautiful sentences, artful storytelling, a wickedly original voice, and, of course, unforgettable crackpots. Pritchard has perfect comic pitch, intelligence to burn, and writes the finest metaphors of any fiction writer I know." -- Sigrid Nunez, author of A Feather on the Breath of God and The Last of Her Kind

"Sara Pritchard's writing is so astonishing and delightful that these stories, if they fancied, could run away and join the circus. Lately is one of the most incandescent and tornadic collections I have ever read. Pure white magic. I bow at the clicking ruby slippers of Sara Pritchard." -- Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles and The Worthy

"The stories in Lately have a lovely strangeness. They're full of bright homely details and random events, desertions and disappearances, and their conclusions rise to praise the quirky human capacity for reinvention. A book of rare and fresh originality." -- Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven

"A dazzlingly original voice." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and The Voyage of the Narwhal

"Sara Pritchard is the real deal. With precision and humor, she creates worlds the reader enters with effortless grace, never wanting to leave or interrupt the proceedings. I can think of no other writer who can take you from the hills of West Virginia to the train tracks of Morocco with such style and grace. More, Sara! More!" -- Adriana Trigiani, bestselling author of Big Stone Gap and Lucia, Lucia

"Lately is such a moving and funny collection that reading it makes my heart ache. I would follow Pritchard and her characters anywhere just to hear what they had to say." --Vendela Vida, author of And Now You Can Go and Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name

"Lately, Sara Pritchard's unforgettable linked stories, reads like a love-letter to the hysterical juxtapositions, absurd misses, and lost opportunities of the world. The book is funny, sad, irreverent, and dead-on; one that shouldn't be missed." -- Kate Walbert, author of Our Kind

"Lately is a page-turner, a collaged Valentine of a book, and Sara Pritchard is a genius. She embraces her characters' eccentricities -- in youth, in middle and old age, and at the threshold of death -- with wit, compassion, inventive surrealism, and a deeply realistic insight. Pritchard knows the secrets of both life and death and reveals them with a delightfully addictive insouciance. This is a book to fall in love with, and to read over and over." -- Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile

"Each of the 11 stories in the unsettling collection stands elegantly on its own, but collectively they branch out and intertwine with each other." Columbus Dispatch

"Pritchard's trademark, often irreverent humor bubbles to the surface over and over again . . . Masterfully done, short stories impart whole chapters' worth of insight into a few brilliantly honed sentences. Pritchard proves she is a worthy contender in both the novel form and its concentrated cousin. Highly recommended." Library Journal Starred

"Well-calibrated forays into unwieldy moments --