The Quick-Change Artist : Swallow Press : 9780804010931 : 0804010935 : 30 Sep 2006 : Finalist for the 2007 John Gardner Award for Fiction 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 narr