"Her stories are like marzipan: dense with flavor and beautifully wrought . . . Lately demands to be savored." --Karen Karbo, Entertainment Weekly BACK COVER COPY "A dazzlingly original voice." -- Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever In this deliciously heart-rending collection, eleven interconnected stories present women and men whose lives have been influenced by Bob Dylan and Vietnam, childhood accidents and family mysteries. When two sisters throw a divorce party, it's a Martha Stewart vision gone haywire. A coed in the late 1960s muddles through an unplanned pregnancy while the father is missing in action. A vacationer thinks she sees her late father on a transatlantic flight. With charming prose, offbeat characters, and emotional depth, Sara Pritchard illuminates our defining moments. "Lately has all the elements that enchanted readers of Crackpots: beautiful sentences, artful storytelling, a wickedly original voice, and, of course, unforgettable crackpots. Pritchard has perfect comic pitch, intelligence to burn, and writes the finest metaphors of any fiction writer I know." -- Sigrid Nunez, author of The Last of Her Kind "Sara Pritchard's writing is so astonishing and delightful that these stories, if they fancied, could run away and join the circus. Lately is one of the most incandescent and tornadic collections I have ever read. Pure white magic. I bow before the clicking ruby slippers of Sara Pritchard." -- Will Clarke, author of Lord Vishnu's Love Handles "A book of rare and fresh originality." -- Joan Silber, author of Ideas of Heaven "Lately is such a moving and funny collection that reading it makes my heart ache. I would follow Pritchard and her characters anywhere just to hear what they had to say." -- Vendela Vida, author of Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name "Lately is a page-turner, a collaged valentine of a book, and Sara Pritchard is a genius. She embraces her characters' eccentricities with wit, compassion, inventive surrealism, and a deeply realistic insight. Pritchard knows the secrets of both life and death and reveals them with a delightfully addictive insouciance. This is a book to fall in love with, and to read over and over." -- Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile Sara Pritchard is the author of the novel Crackpots, which was a New York Times Notable Book and was selected by Ursula Hegi to receive the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction.

Unidentified suit-and-tie with Pittsburgh's renowned Omelette King, Rudy Stanish (March 2006).

"On the surface a charming, quirky, coming-of-age story, Crackpots is really far more than that. Beneath the pungent, dazzlingly original voice, beyond the revelations of the heart's most secret corners, a brilliant mind unravels and remakes our standard conceptions of chronology, at the same time pouring forth metaphors of astounding beauty. This is a most unusual book" —Andrea Barrett, author of Servants of the Map and Ship Fever

Sara Pritchard won the 2002 Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize in Fiction, sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Her winning novel, Crackpots, chosen by the contest judge, Ursula Hegi, was published by Houghton Mifflin and went on to become a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2003. Under the pseudonym Delta B. Horne, Sara has published stories and essays in Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Chattahoochee Review, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Sara lives in Morgantown, West Virginia, and is on the faculty of the Wilkes University Low-Residency MA/MFA Creative Writing Program in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

"and you are my sofa . . ."

Yo. That's me—Sara Pritchard—lounging on the Omelet King’s Couch in my study in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 2004. The couch (I refer to him as “he”) is upholstered in maroon mohair and was made probably in the 1920s. He’s a dead ringer for the sofa gracing the cover of Frank Zappa’s album One Size Fits All and immortalized in Zappa’s “Sofa No. 2,” a song narrated by a chrome dinette that has a crush on the sofa. Here are the lyrics (note the reference to eggs!):

Sofa No. 2 by Frank Zappa (1974)

I am the heaven
I am the water
I am the dirt beneath your
rollers
I am your secret smut & lost
metal money
Down your cracks
I am your cracks & crannies
I am the clouds
I am embroidered
I am the author of all tucks &
damask piping
I am the chrome dinette
I am the chrome dinette
I am the eggs of all persuasion
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am all days & nights
I am here
And you are my sofa
I am here
And you are my sofa
I am here
And you are my sofa


The Omelet King (Rudy Stanish, 1913-2008) was a renowned chef in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When movie stars and musicians and other famous people visited Pittsburgh and partied all night, they sometimes went over to the Omelet King’s house in the wee hours—like after a club closed—and knocked on the Omelet King’s door, and the Omelet King got up out of bed in his pj’s and invited the celebrities into his house and made them one of his famous Omelet King omelets while they sat on his overstuffed mohair couch in the living room.

My friend JackElroy bought the Omelet King’s Couch from his friend Nikki, who bought it at an estate sale at the Omelet King’s home. Nikki said that the couch was in a big hallway and all over the hallway walls, up to the ceiling almost, were autographed black-and-white photographs of celebrities like Louis Armstrong, Jackie O., Annette Funicello (one of the original Mouseketeers), Cybill Shepherd, Mohammed Ali, and Mick Jagger—sitting on the Omelet King’s Couch! JackElroy said Nikki said that he’s pretty sure—maybe almost positive—that he even saw Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio sitting on the Omelet King’s Couch in one of the photos. And maybe even Judy Garland.

Everybody at the estate sale at the Omelet King’s house was shoving and fighting over the autographed photographs on the walls, which they figured were worth a lot of money, and while they were preoccupied with that, Nikki grabbed the Omelet King’s Couch and drug (dragged?) it out the door and bought it right out from under their noses. FOR PEANUTS.

In 2005, the Omelet King’s Couch went to live with my friend Beth Nardella (a.k.a. Lemon Cadet) and her husband, the famous Aaron Behnke, who almost won the Sexiest Male Vegan on Earth contest. But . . . Beth had a baby in May 2008, and she called me up and said “The Omelet King’s Couch has gotta go.” The room the Omelet King’s Couch was in was converted to a nursery! “What?” I said. “Like a baby can’t sleep on a couch?”

So . . . in October 2009, the Omelet King’s Couch went to live with my friend, playwright Matt Hinton (also known as THE VOICE of the Wilkes University Creative Writing Program) in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Who knows who will sit on him (No, no, no . . . not Matt! The Omelet King’s Couch!) next?

Viva L’Omelet King’s Couch!