Exquisite. . . . Pritchard has an ear for dialog, an eye for detail, and a talent for creating engaging characters that are finely drawn, multidimensional, and far from stereotypical.
The Carnation Milk Palace
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.
Curious Iguana “Unraveled Readers Book Club” selection
Ebook
- ISBN
- 9781954276659
Paperback
- ISBN
- 9781954276642
Read Melissa Pritchard’s appreciation of Mavis Gallant’s work and the way it inspired her “to slip free of old rules” while crafting the stories of The Carnation Milk Palace at the Marvelous Paragraph Project.
Preview the title story from The Carnation Milk Palace in Ecotone and learn more from Melissa Pritchard about it in the Hingston & Olsen Short Story Advent Calendar series.
Events
Curious Iguana “Unraveled Readers Book Club” discusses Melissa Pritchard’s The Carnation Milk Palace
Join Curious Iguana and Magpie Fibers at RAK Brewing Co. for the “Unraveled Readers Book Club” featuring a crafting session and discussion of Melissa Pritchard’s story collection The Carnation Milk Palace.
Melissa Pritchard is the author of thirteen books, including the short story collections The Carnation Milk Palace (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press in January 2027) 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.
visit author page »Praise for The Carnation Milk Palace
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
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
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