The Quickchange Artist: Stories,New

Review As for the actual characters in The QuickChange Artist, they are some of the most unique and surprising in contemporary American short fiction. Ultimately, the most intriguing of all these characters is (the town of) Glen Ellen itself, with its low locomotive thunder, its singing rails luring us into a world we will not soon forget.The Southeast ReviewThere are writers who have a gift for the short story the way Coltrane had a gift for making music with a saxophone: Cary Holladay is one of those. She is a poet of the unlikely screwball tale of possibility, quick changes of connection and view that startle and delight. Holladay is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary fiction. Robert MorganThese stories succeed wonderfully, flashing with insight and lingering in the mind long after they're over.Robert Olen ButlerThese stories are strung together like pearls. Theyre delightful and engaging and heartfelt, with quirky characters and wonderful phrasings, such as supper club grief treatment. A triumph!Bobbie Ann MasonAdd my voice to the chorus of those hailing this brave new talent on the American scene. The short story is alive and well. Just open this book and see.Richard Bausch Product Description Finalist for the 2007 John Gardner Award for FictionIn these stories of magic and memory, clustered around a resort hotel in a small Virginia community, Cary Holladay takes the reader on an excursion through the changes wrought by time on the community and its visitors. From the quiet of a rural forest to the rhythms of rock and roll, The QuickChange Artist is at once whimsical and hardedged, dizzying in its matteroffact delivery of the fantastic.Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernaturalespecially in the lives of children coming of ageoffer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The QuickChange Artist. In the title story, a young chambermaid is in love with a foreign magician who performs at the hotel where she works. In Heaven, set during the 1918 flu epidemic, a struggling mother and son rely on the support of their fortunetelling plow horse. The narrator of Jane's Hat recalls a childhood enlivened by an unusual school principal and a friend who starts finding beauty everywhere.Horses and the people who love them, wanderers and those who feed them, creatures that disappear and those who search for them: these are stories with a constant heart. About the Author Cary Holladay has published seven volumes of fiction, including The QuickChange Artist,Horse People: Stories, and The Deer in the Mirror. Her stories and essays have appeared in Ecotone, Epoch, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals. Her story MerryGoSorry was selected by Stephen King for an O. Henry award. She teaches at the University of Memphis.