The Quick-Change Artist: Stories

By Cary C. Holladay

Book Overview

In 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 Quick-Change Artist is at once whimsical and hard-edged, dizzying in its matter-of-fact delivery of the fantastic.

Romance, a sense of place and belonging, and the supernatural-especially in the lives of children coming of age-offer windows into worlds beyond the ordinary throughout The Quick-Change 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 fortune-telling 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804010935
• ISBN13: 9780804010931
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.3"