Critical Praise

"If Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King had written a book together, this would be it. Hilarious and scary! "

———Fannie Flagg, author of Fried

Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

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"Triumphant . . . It is a measure of Mr. Childress's skill as a novelist that he soon had me eating out of his hand. . . . This novel seems not only fresh and original but positively inspired. "

———The New York Times Book Review

"A wonderful and powerful novel . . . Mark Childress is a novelist of astonishing gifts. "

———Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides

for Tender "Tender is more than just a fine novel; it is a big, all-American, Technicolor dreamboat of a book, as vital and intense as anything I've read in the last ten years. "

———Stephen King

"Haunting . . . An evocation of an American phenomenon and the time and place that nurtured an ascent to glory. Childress gets everything right. "

———The Los Angeles Times Book Review

for Crazy in Alabama "Something that nobody has ever written before . . . Childress plays out his two hands here, civil rights and husbandicide, like a master playing out a fancy game of double solitaire. "

———The Washington Post Book World

"A speeding bullet of a book . . . In this adventure story the hero, Victor, is sublimely lost, a celebrated ragamuffin like Huck Finn. "

———The New York Times Book Review

"Fantastic, extravagant . . . Thoroughly charming. "

———The Boston Globe

for A World Made of Fire "That rarest of finds, an unsentimental coming-of-age story, the novel is also an engrossing mystery. . . . We couldn't ask for more. "

———San Francisco Chronicle