Praise for The Palace of Illusions 'The short stories here are so tight and polished that it's hard to believe that this is only Addonizio's second collection.strikingly honest depictions of characters.A highly enjoyable collection with something for everyone recommended for readers of Lydia Davis or fans of modern fairy tales.' -Library Journal 'The 14 stories in this new collections range from realist, contemporary narratives to darkly comic fairy tales that subtly complicate the binary oppositions of good versus evil and contentment versus despair.Addonizio is adept at humanizing monsters or characters that resemble them.The Palace of Illusions is a collection of many delights, its mirrors reflecting and magnifying the contradictions and conflicts inherent in human experience.' -San Francisco Chronicle 'A streak of dark humor, colored with a tinge of pathos.' -Oakland Tribune '. The stories in this collection have appeared in journals ranging from Narrative Magazine to The Fairy Tale Review, and include the much loved “Ever After,” which was featured on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” In “Beautiful Lady of the Snow,” young Annabelle turns to a host of family pets to combat the alienation she feels caught between her distracted mother and ailing grandfather in “Night Owls,” a young college student’s crush on her acting partner is complicated by the bloodlust of being half-vampire in “Cancer Poems,” a dying woman turns to a poetry workshop to make sense of her terminal diagnosis and final days in “Intuition,” a young girl’s sexual forays bring her closer to her best friend’s father and in the collection’s title story, a photographer looks back to his youth spent as a young illusionist under the big tent and his obsessive affair with the carnival owner’s wife.ĭistracted parents, first love, the twin forces of alienation and isolation: the characters in The Palace of Illusions all must contend with these challenges, trafficking in the fault lines between the real and the imaginary, often in a world not of their making. In this collection, gifted poet and novelist Kim Addonizio uses her literary powers to bring to life a variety of settings, all connected through the suggestion that things in the known world are not what they seem.

The palace illusions