“Unsentimental yet elegant. . . . With ease, [The Sojourn] joins the ranks of other significant works of fiction portraying World War I.”

“No one is quite so brilliant at voicing the all-but-impossible-to-track interior lives of the most complex human beings as is Melissa Pritchard . . . there is so much energy and inventiveness!  Her linguistic flexibility is stunning, comic and gravely substantial. At its heart is always the troubled, often confused but courageous and tenacious human heart.”

“Fueled by roofless imagination and fearless curiosity The Odditorium is a case study in how one writer’s wisdom and empathy transforms known facts of existence into something more than magic. Pritchard draws from the cold, deep well of myth, legend, and history to redefine what narrative can do. Each story is a lesson in compassion. Each story is nothing short of genius.  Each story was written for you.”

“The Odditorium is a dazzling wonderment, its cast drawn from the far-flung corners of history and imagination, its language crystalline and high-voltage, its stories fearless and even visionary. Here is an irresistible curiosity cabinet of the famous, the infamous, the mysterious, the half-forgotten—conjured with prodigious empathy, wit, and energy by one of our finest writers. Melissa Pritchard is a treasure and this book is her glorious trove.”

“Faith—hope for the future, the conversion of tragedy into meaning—lurks throughout The Sojourn’s lush and lyrical prose.”

“In this thrillingly protean collection of stories, Melissa Pritchard has done something profound.  By imagining her way into historical moments and illuminating their shadows, she amplifies the music of history so we hear beautifully strange, wondrous notes we never knew were there. These stories resound with a fierce yet playful intelligence and a rare, magnificent generosity.”

“Melissa Pritchard has her GPS set to find the how it is—out there and in the heart—and she makes her way forward with her language on high alert. The prose is rhythmically astute, finely pitched, serving both imagination and witness.”

“Melissa Pritchard’s The Odditorium is as strange, wonderful, and (most important) as much fun as anything good old Robert LeRoy Ripley could ever have envisioned. Passionate, bold imaginings that illuminate the darkest, most precious reaches of our lives. Believe it: these stories are a gift.”

“Inventive and satisfying . . . each story is a unique reading experience.”

“Charmingly bizarre . . . [Pritchard] shows she can write—and think—magically.”

“A fairly short, brisk story that covers a lot of ground. . . . Beautifully written and uplifting even through all the tragedy.”

“Great storytelling and fantastic writing. I highly recommend The Odditorium to readers who enjoyed high-quality short stories and lovers of literary fiction.”

“The breadth of [Melissa Pritchard’s] scholarship and imagination, and her accomplished prose left me dazzled. . . . Hers are stories that educate you. . . . If there is risk in being imaginative and stepping outside of certain norms for publishers, then Ms. Pritchard and all of her editors are risk-takers and her readers are beneficiaries.”

“The beauty of Pritchard’s short story collection begins with the cover design, which depicts the corner of what looks like a natural history museum with large, frightening fish. Inside, there’s an equally unusual collection of tales, most of them taking the reader to distant lands, distant times.”

“[The Sojourn] deserves to be placed on the same shelf as Remarque, Hemingway and Heller. . . . Krivak has written an anti-war novel with all the heat of a just-fired artillery gun.”

“Pritchard is one of those amazingly rare contemporary authors whose prose is so lyrical and so thought-provoking that you’re going to want a nice window of quiet time to savor it, like a well poured glass of Malbec on a chilly November evening.”

“The Odditorium contains eight ambitious and fantastic stories that transcend genre while fascinating with their language and historical figures brought to life.”

“Mesh[es] the surreal and metafictional with a deeply-felt humanism.”

“Captivating, thoughtful. . . . A poignant reminder of how humanity was so greatly affected by what was once called the war to end all wars.”

“The rewards for a careful expedition into The Odditorium are unforgettable moments of timeless, resonant truth . . . Pritchard’s descriptive talents illuminate not just the emotional depths of her characters but humanity’s physical innards as well.”

“Humor of life, solemness of its loss, and the heroes who make it happen, The Odditorium is a fine assortment of short fiction, very much recommended.”

“A classic of war. . . . Beautifully plotted, as rapt and understated as a hymn.”

“Eight off-beat short stories . . . “Captain Brown and the Royal Victoria Hospital,” the volume’s standout . . . is atmospheric, enigmatic, and moving.”

“Reading Melissa Pritchard’s short-story collection The Odditorium is a bit like peering into a Wunderkammer, one of those magical cabinets where the rich and adventurous used to display their treasures. The beautiful, the grotesque. The odd, the charming . . . Pritchard uses fiction to bring new life to these figures—some famous and mythologized, and others not—blending the historical and the fantastical to create a collection of great charisma.”

“Award-winning author Pritchard crosses genres to create energized, fiercely atmospheric tales about holy fools, haunted hospitals, Annie Oakley, and more.”

“A beautiful tale of persistence and dogged survival.”

“Very clever . . . all the stories carry undertones of darkness that will creep into your soul and plant their desperate seeds deep within.”

“A master of the form . . . [Pritchard’s] fiction, like the best Gothic classics, makes us feel like we are traveling on a pleasant, meandering river—until we round the last bend and find ourselves on the edge of a waterfall, looking down into the darkest depths of the human soul.”

“The Odditorium is a stunning read, dense and intricately woven, masterfully assembled and sensitively rendered. Pritchard’s text somehow comes across as at once delicate and forceful. Her interest in history—literary and cultural—in this collection adds a depth of focus and an attention to nuance that is truly arresting.”

“[A] powerful, assured first novel. . . . If the early pages of The Sojourn sometimes recall Cormac McCarthy (especially The Crossing), the heart of the book is a harrowing portrait of men at war, as powerful as Ernst Junger’s classic Storm of Steel and Isaac Babel’s brutally poetic Red Cavalry stories.”

“Any great writer does many things at once, of course, but most lead with a particular strength. And then there is Pritchard, who simply turns all the dials up to eleven. In [The Odditorium], more than in previous works, history gives her the best playing field for her considerable energies and produces some of her most moving and satisfying stories to date.”

“Weird and wonder-filled.”

“Splendid. . . . A novel for anyone who has a sharp eye and ear for life.”

“Pritchard’s best stories are ambitious, lush and even thrilling. She takes risks, different risks in different stories. Can she write a segment in the form of a comedic Shakespearean dialogue? She can. Does a story evolve into epistolary form? It does. Will she be able to build a story around the format of an old newspaper feature? She will. Can she do it all with poetic, vivid prose? With one hand tied behind her back. Is Melissa Pritchard someone whose short fiction should be well known? Do you even have to ask?”

“Pritchard’s exuberant prose is perfectly suited to carry the antic freight of these often bizarre, always cerebral stories. . . . This is a fulsome compendium of ripping good yarns.”

“Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine. . . . These are stories full of holy living creatures.”

“A gripping and harrowing war story that has the feel of a classic.”

“With unforced elegance, this novel renders the journey of a young man who leaves his impoverished shepherd’s life behind for the World War I killing fields of Europe.”

“Melissa Pritchard’s aptly titled The Odditorium considers the inner lives of the strange, the damaged and the forgotten . . . with its zest for the macabre and its time-spanning imaginative appetite . . . the singularity of her narrators remains indelible [and] shows that fiction still has the ability to shock and surprise.”

“[An] exquisite first novel. . . . Full of violence and beauty, Krivak shares a unique story about a boy becoming a man during a tragic period in world history.”

“The Sojourn is a beautifully told story of a young man’s coming of age in World War I Austria. It is quiet, serene, and filled with humanity, even while recounting scenes of violence and war.”

“The stories in this strange and original collection bend genres—horror, mystery, western—into wondrous new shapes.”

“A novel of uncommon lyricism and moral ambiguity that balances the spare with the expansive.”

“Emotionally rich.”

“A writer at the height of her powers.”

“A story that celebrates, in its stripped down but resonant fashion, the flow between creation and destruction we all call life.”

“Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and then there are writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Krivak belongs to the latter. The Sojourn, about a war and a family and coming-of-age, does not present a single false moment of sentimental creation. Rather, it looks deeply into its characters’ lives with wisdom and humanity, and, in doing so, helps us experience a distant past that feels as if it could be our own.”

“A work of great power and originality. There is a striking freedom of style here, which allows the author to move without any sense of strain or loss of balance from the visionary and ecstatic to the exquisitely precise. The novel is compelling to read, sometimes horrific, and deeply moving because it is woven together into the single quilt of our humanity.”

“Tinkers is truly remarkable. It achieves and sustains a unique fusion of language and perception. Its fine touch plays over the textured richnesses of very modest lives, evoking again and again a frisson of deep recognition, a sense of primal encounter with the brilliant, elusive world of the senses. It confers on the reader the best privilege fiction can afford, the illusion of ghostly proximity to other human souls.”

“Paul Harding’s Tinkers is not just a novel—though it is a brilliant novel. It’s an instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything. Harding takes the back off to show you the miraculous ticking of the natural world, the world of clocks, generations of family, an epileptic brain, the human soul. In astounding language sometimes seemingly struck by lightning, sometimes as tight and complicated as clockwork, Harding shows how enormous fiction can be, and how economical. Read this book and marvel.”

“A complex reflection on memory, consciousness, and the meaning of life.”

“A novel that you’ll want to savor. . . . I found reading it to be an incredibly moving experience. . . . This book begs to be read aloud.”

“Filled with lovely Whitmanesque descriptions of the natural world, this slim novel gives shape to the extraordinary variety in the thoughts of otherwise ordinary men.”

“Outstanding. . . . The real star is Harding’s language, which dazzles whether he’s describing the workings of clocks, sensory images of nature, the many engaging side characters who populate the book, or even a short passage on how to build a bird nest. This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship.”

“Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense.”

“This excellent debut proves Harding to be a writer of exceptional poise, possessing clear-eyed skill and, like his characters, a steady hand for the finest of details.”

“A luminous novel . . . that is not about death but instead an investi­gation into what life is all about. . . . The precipice is what Harding is so concentrated on, as though he were holding a magnifying glass up under bright sunlight and setting fire to the page.”

“Unique, captivating, and a measure more magical than most other contemporary novels.”

“Harding is a first-rate writer, and his fascination with what makes his characters tick recommends him as a philosopher, as well.”

“Sometimes a novel beguiles from the opening sentence. Paul Harding’s seductive Pulitzer-winning debut does precisely that [and] the prism of an entire world emerges. . . . The story and the stories within it flow like water over stones.”

“Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables a reader to look at the world differently.”

“The most captivating exploration of history, time and human consciousness. . . . An expert piece of historical and psychological archaeology, which unpicks the (bewitching) intricacies of ordinary life while also asking the terrifying, unanswerable, yet endlessly fascinating questions that haunt us all.”

“Tantalizing. . . . Tinkers takes an uncompromising look at the complex emotional geometry that exists between parents and children.”

“This is a book so meticulously assembled that vocabulary choices like ‘craquelure’ and ‘scrieved’—far from seeming pretentious—serve as reminders of how precise and powerful a tool good English can be.”

“Stunning. . . . Harding, who apprenticed with his horologist grandfather, uses the clock as a metaphor for the cosmos and its deeper intricacies and mysteries.”

“This beautiful novel is sui generis; the most insignificant events . . . radiate fire and light.”

“Vivid and original. . . . Tinkers [is] going to be around for a long, long time.”

“The life and death questions Paul Harding raises in Tinkers, as well as the richness of his writing, keep a reader coming back to it. . . . Like Faulkner, he never shies away from describing what seems impossible to put into words.”

“Few contemporary writers have [Harding’s] gift for uniting language and nature through a powerful imagination. Tinkers is a father-son story told with skill, depth and beauty.”

“Tinkers is a poignant exploration of where we may journey when the clock has barely a tick or two left and we really can’t go any­where at all.”

“In Paul Harding’s stunning first novel, we find what readers, writ­ers and reviewers live for.”

“[An] astonishing novel.”

“Alive with gorgeous sentences.”

“This compact, adamantine debut dips in and out of the consciousness of a New England patriarch. . . . In Harding’s skillful evocation, Crosby’s life, seen from its final moments, becomes a mosaic of memories.”

“Quiet, moving, breathtakingly crafted.”

“A novel with an old-­fashioned meditative quality so perfectly done that it is refreshing to read in a world filled with noises and false excitements. . . . It brings the reader to a closer understand­ing of his own life than he could have imagined before taking the journey.”

“There are few perfect debut American novels. . . . To this list ought to be added Paul Harding’s devastating first book, Tinkers. . . . Harding has written a masterpiece.”

“An exquisitely written novel that captures the mysteries of relationships, memories and time passing in language that is both spare and lyrical. It is a true gem that sparkles with thoughtfulness, intelligence and life.”

“[Tinkers is a novel] we hear customers hand-selling to other readers in that you’ve-got-to-read-this voice. The protagonist’s deathbed memories of his father are a meditation on life and death, written in impeccably lovely prose. Tinkers is incomparable.”

“In this lyrical novel, the life of a dying man is examined through the smallest moments of time and memory.”

“An exquisite novel . . . told with a voice so keen and beautiful as to leave the reader in a state of excitement produced only by literature, and the best literature at that.”

“A powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”

“A fair and brilliantly written tour de force of this long forgotten war. A book that is long overdue.”

“When I was commissioned to do this report, the first thing I was handed was a copy of The Cage. Weiss’s scrupulously balanced account should serve as a guidepost for decision-makers and scholars of international affairs. A book can change the world.”

“The Cage is a comprehensive and compellingly readable account of one of the very worst atrocity stories this century. Gordon Weiss is scrupulously evenhanded in describing the terrible excesses of the Tamil Tigers as well as the Sri Lankan authorities. His book is a timely prod to the world’s collective conscience.”

“This shattering, heartbreaking tale of savagery and suffering not only lifts the veil that conceals one of the most awful tragedies of the current era, but also helps us understand what should be done, not just in this sad and beautiful land, but long before other such horrors spiral out of control.”

“Some of the best coverage of Sri Lanka right now is coming from Gordon Weiss.”

“[The Cage] raises . . . the question of how witnesses should respond to alleged war crimes, human rights violations, and the breakdown of the rule of law. A sweeping discussion. . . . Weiss deftly sketches the main issues for a general audience while also providing a solid bibliography and detailed endnotes. The book will appeal to readers interested in Sri Lanka, South Asia, political science, military history, and international relations.”

“An accessible and compelling narrative of Sri Lanka’s often violent and tortured history. . . . Weiss pulls no punches in tackling the atrocities committed by the Tigers. But he is equally scathing about the failure of the successive Sri Lankan administrations to deal with the aspirations of the Tamil minority and brutal tactics employed by the Sri Lankan Army to quash the rebellion.”

“A courageous document that holds to account the brutality of a rogue state that is all too often simply seen as a beautiful tourist destination.”

“[A] painstakingly researched and referenced study, and [Weiss’] conclusions are nothing short of horrific.”

“A striking account of the ruthless terror wreaked by both sides on the innocent civilians.”

“One of the best books published by an Australian this year . . . Himself the grandson of a man who was murdered in Auschwitz, Weiss is aware of the thin line that separates civilised societies from those that sink into collective madness governed by hatred.”

“Weiss excels at chronicling the changes in attitude of the post-9/11 world and the changing geopolitical landscape. . . . For those interested in this modern human rights tragedy and how basic political rights get shredded by both the government and the freedom fighters, then The Cage is a must read.”

“A potent analysis.”

“Gripping. . . . [The Cage] is not only a good starting point for understanding contemporary Sri Lankan history, but also offers a beautifully articulated insight into the human experience.”

“The general outlines of this story are familiar. But Weiss, a UN official in Colombo at the time, provides harrowing details, as well as insight into the decades of brutal conflict that brought the two sides to the point where they were willing to commit war crimes.”

“An excellent account of how [the government] victory was won, and of the price paid for the present peace by Sri Lankans. . . . Scrupulously fair.”

“Mr. Weiss accurately lays out the central challenges that regional actors, nongovernmental organizations and the international community face in Sri Lanka: ensuring accountability for possible war crimes, and a life of dignity and equality for all Sri Lankan citizens. . . . This powerful book is a haunting reminder of the price countries in the developing world pay for the flawed choices of their founders.”

“The Cage is a tightly written and clear-eyed narrative about one of the most disturbing human dramas of recent years. . . . A riveting, cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked political power in a country at war. A must-read.”