Melissa Pritchard

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...

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 of travels with Ethiopian tribes, and...