The Carnation Milk Palace
About this ebook
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.
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About the author
Melissa Pritchard is the author of thirteen books, including the short story collections The Carnation Milk Palace and The Odditorium, the novels Flight of the Wild Swan and Palmerino, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write. Among other honors, she has received the Flannery O’Connor Award, Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and Carl Sandburg Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carson McCullers Center. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she lives in Columbus, Georgia.
