Kirjahaku

You need only one best friend, Daniel Musgrove figures, to make it through high school alive. After his family moves to Mississippi just before his junior year, Daniel finds fellow outsider Tim Cousins. The two become inseparable, sharing a fascination with ridicule, The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, and Arnita Beecham, the most bewitching girl at Minor High. But soon things go terribly wrong. The friends commit a small crime that grows larger and larger, and threatens to engulf the whole town. Arnita, the first black prom queen in the history of the school, is injured and wakes up a different person. And Daniel, Tim, and their families are swept up in a shocking chain of events. "There is nothing small about Childress's fine novel. It's big in all the ways that matter -- big in daring, big in insight, and big-hearted. Really, really big-hearted." -New Orleans Times-Picayune

Georgia Bottoms is known in her small community of Six Points, Alabama, as a beautiful, well-to-do, and devoutly Baptist Southern belle. Nobody realizes that the family fortune has long since disappeared, and a determinedly single woman like Georgia needs an alternative, and discreet, means of income. In Georgia's case it is six well-heeled lovers -- one for each day of the week, with Mondays off -- none of whom knows about the others. But when the married preacher who has been coming to call (Saturdays) decides to confess their affair in front of the whole congregation, Georgia must take drastic measures to stop him. In George Bottoms, Mark Childress proves once again his unmistakable skill for combining the hilarious and the absurd to reveal the inner workings of the rebellious human heart.

By the time Newsweek dubs thirty-four-year-old Ben (Superman) Willis "The New Super-Poet of Pop," he has millions of adoring fans, piles of money, a beautiful family--and a secret desire to chuck it all and disappear forever. He gets his wish after a violent storm, some wicked Mexican weed, and a faulty compass cause his precious plane to crash on a remote tropical island. When he hears Marilyn Monroe's breathless voice saying he's "kind of cute," Superman thinks he has woken up dead. Amelia Earhart is there too, noting the worst landing she has ever seen, while Jimmy Hoffa cooks up some fine chicken barbecue. They never died, you see. They just came here to escape their celebrity--invited guests, living out their lives in total privacy, all expenses paid, every need fulfilled. To Superman, it is heaven on earth. Until he discovers the one little catch: he can never leave. . . .

East Tupelo was a sprinkling of poor houses at the scratched-out back edge of Mississippi--and the birthplace of a boy who would become the greatest rock legend of his time. In Tender, novelist Mark Childress has redefined the American epic. He takes us on a wild ride through the last three decades as his fictional hero, Leroy Kirby, makes his meteoric rise to stardom, from the poverty-stricken child of an overprotective mother and absent father, to an icon who stands for everything American--a role that will ultimately consume him. After reading Tender, you will never think about the South, fame, or rock-and-roll the same way again.

"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."

"A speeding bullet of a book ... The hero, Victor, is sublimely lost, a celebrated ragamuffin like Huck Finn." -- The New York Times Book ReviewIn Alabama in 1942, sixteen-year-old Victor can only imagine what world war means. That is, until he plays a role in a perilous intrigue at home.

New York Times bestselling author Mark Childress was like many liberal Americans whose life veered off the tracks as Donald Trump rose to power. In his day-by-day journal, Childress tirelessly pursues the funny side of America's descent into Trumpism. From Vietnam to New Orleans to the Women's March and beyond, the author spins variations on all the absurd, ridiculous, head-exploding, enraging, unbelievable moments of the Trump Years. If Trump drives you crazy, this is the book for you. Jacket design: Peter Thorpe