The Quick-change Artist

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 supernaturalespecially in the lives of children coming of ageoffer 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.

A native of Virginia, Cary Holladay is the author of a novel, Mercury, and two collections of short stories, The People Down South and The Palace of Wasted Footsteps. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Tennessee Arts Commission as well as an O. Henry Prize. Her work has appeared in New Stories from the South and many literary magazines.