Vroege Recensenten

Reflections on a literary life pulled in two directions: from war zone journalism to the writing and teaching of fiction “Pritchard polishes the strange and makes it shine.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams at the San Francisco Chronicle “Heartfelt . . . bear[s] powerful witness to suffering, compassion, and transcendence.” —Kirkus Reviews “Gorgeous and moving. . . . Each of these essays confirms that to write is to think and feel, to take part in the profound and sacred act of witness. Read together—and the book is so arresting that many readers will finish it in a single sitting—the essays amount to a clear and irrefutable mandate for empathy.” —Bret Anthony Johnston, director of Creative Writing at Harvard University, author of Remember Me Like This, and editor of Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer (from the Foreword) In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard 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, her search for the lost legacy of American literature as embodied by Walt Whitman, her reports from Afghanistan while embedded with a young female GI, her tales of travel with Ethiopian tribes, and the heartrending story of her informally adopted son William, a former Sudanese child slave. Through these fifteen magnificent essays, Pritchard shares her passion for writing and storytelling that educates, honors, and inspires.