A World Made of Fire - Paperback

by Mark Childress (Author)

"Mark Childress is an artist with an ear comparable to Eudora Welty's. I haven't read a Southern novel since Losing Battles that has given me such pleasure." - Harper Lee.An extraordinary burst of praise greeted Mark Childress's enthralling first novel, "A World Made of Fire." Set in Alabama at the turn of the century, it tells the story of Callie Bates and her adoring children; the preacher-husband leaving in a buggy after the wedding and returning with spiteful sermons about the children Callie gives birth to year after year in his absence. It is the story of the secret visitor who is the radiant element of Callie's life; of the tragic Christmas Day of 1909; and of the children who survive it - Jacko, believed to have magical powers because he was saved from the fire in his mother's arms, and young Stella, blighted by the sorrow she has witnessed. The poetic, non-comic novel that launched the career of the author of "Crazy in Alabama" and "One Mississippi."

Front Jacket

The ambivalence of fire--as evocation of glowing love and furious destruction--permeates this stunning first novel by Mark Childress, a young Southern writer who gives fresh expression to his region's literary preoccupations. A World Made of Fire is set in rural Alabama in the decades before World War I . . . Childress has created a wholly believable world. The landscapes are forceful and the characters deeply felt. . . . A World Made of Fire probes varieties of tenderness and love, principally from the viewpoint of [a] young girl, Estelle Bates, whose literary forebears include Lena Grove in Faulkner's Light in August. . . .Childress dramatically traces her course, keeping the violent and the tender elements in a tense, remarkably effective balance. . . . Reading it is rather like staring for a good long while into the coals of a fire; in that concentration of energy, many things can be learned.
--Newsday

Author Biography

Mark Childress was born in 1957 in Monroeville, Alabama and grew up in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. After graduation from the University of Alabama in 1978, Childress was a reporter for The Birmingham News, Features Editor of Southern Living magazine, and Regional Editor of The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. Childress is the author of six novels: "A World Made of Fire" (Knopf, 1984), "V For Victor" (Knopf, 1988) "Tender" (Harmony, 1990), "Crazy in Alabama" (Putnam, 1993), and "Gone for Good," (Knopf, 1988) and "One Mississippi," published in July 2006 by Little, Brown & Co. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, San Francisco Chronicle, Saturday Review, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Travel and Leisure, and other national and international publications. Childress wrote the screenplay of the Columbia Pictures film "Crazy in Alabama," an official selection of the Venice and San Sebastian film festivals. He lives all over the place, currently in New York City.