Pritchard wins Kafka fiction prize

Author Melissa Pritchard has been selected as the 1996 recipient of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman for her book of short stories The Instinct for Bliss.

The award is given yearly by the University English department and Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women's Studies, in conjunction with Writers and Books.

Pritchard will receive her award at a ceremony at 8 p.m., Friday, February 21, in the Writers and Books Auditorium, 740 University Avenue. She will be reading from The Instinct for Bliss and will be available to sign books after the ceremony.

Cost of admission is $4 for Writers and Books members and University students, faculty, and staff, and $5 for the public. Seating is limited, and tickets are available at the door.

Each of the 12 stories in The Instinct for Bliss (Zoland Books, Cambridge, 1995) reflects a longing to travel beyond safe boundaries. One tells of a young cook who prepares a gourmet final meal for a prisoner on death row; in another, a neglected, anorexic girl finds spiritual nourishment in the faith of her elderly Hispanic neighbor.

"What moves me are the ways we human beings, less acutely conscious or aware of this instinct for bliss or its source, still go about every day trying to satisfy it, generating a great deal of conflict and frustration for ourselves, yet also creating occasional windows of that bliss, glimpses of it," Pritchard said in a 1995 interview.

The book is Pritchard's second collection of short stories; her first, Spirit Seizures (1987), received the Flannery O'Connor Short Fiction Award and was named one of the 15 best short story collec tions in as many years by The Bloomsbury Review. Pritchard also is author of a novel, Phoenix, published in 1991.

Pritchard's books have won Pushcart Prizes, the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and the James D. Phelan Award given by the San Francisco Foundation, and have been named among the best American short stories.

Pritchard lives in Tempe, Arizona, and teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.