In rural Alabama, in the decades before World War I, a coming of age can happen in many different, disturbing, and delightful ways. "That rarest of finds, an unsentimental coming-of-age story (that is) also an engrossing mystery".--"San Francisco Chronicle".

Mark Childress is is an artist, with an ear comparable to Eudora Welty's, which to me is the highest praise one can give. I haven't read a Southern novel since Losing Battles that has given me such pleasure. -- Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird The sense of reality with which Childress imbues his characters and their situation is remarkable. He has the true novelist's ability to commit himself entirely to the people and events he envisions, and this is rare; the reader is certain at all points that the author is not playing with the subject, but writing from deep within it. A truly outstanding book is the result. -- James Dickey A World Made of Fire is earthy, adroit, moving -- an excellent novel by a writer of great promise and talent. -- Jesse Hill Ford Mark Childress is a young novelist who has written a memorable story out of the land and people of the Deep South that throughout its length is constantly intruguing with unexpected innovations. The ever-present undercurrent of mystical events will probably startle many readers by arousing and bringing forth unfamiliar emotions. -- Erskine Caldwell A wonderful and powerful novel...Childress's debut in the world of fiction is a cause to be celebrated; he is the real thing. -- Pat Conroy Mark Childress's new-fashioned saga is full of delicate electricity and raw power. -- Barry Hannah This is a damned fine story. There is more here than story, though. This baby resonates. Mark Childress is a writer of almost uncanny stylistic ability and clear vision. His eye for detail is extraordinary. It makes you want to holler Oh yeah! like a guy who's gotten religion at a riverside camp meeting. It's close; it's luxurious in its rightness; it fulfills the central demand of art...to make us see more in what we always thought we were seeing. -- Stephen King A haunting first novel...There is a clear light of genuine story-telling talent shining through it all. -- Library Journal In an impressive debut, Childress has produced a spellbinding tale in the Southern gothic tradition. A writer of poetic acuity, he evokes the atmospher of a small Southern town and brings its inhabitants to life through their colorful, softly cadenced speech. Childress's remarkable command of language -- he uses imagery with sensuous skill -- his sure sense of plot, fueled by mysticism and mystery, and most of all, his beautifully nuanced depiction of Stella's coming of age, will keep readers enthralled. -- Publishers Weekly That rarest of finds, an unsentimental coming-of-age story, A World Made of Fire is also an engrossing mystery. Wrapped in its tale of voodoo and midnight rides is a detailed bestiary of human emotions and behaviors. San Francisco Chronicle Mark Childress's first novel is a complex allegory of pagan magic and Christian retribution... Mr. Childress writes his haunting novel with poetic cadences in brief, intense chapters. He is an author of imagination. Stella's coming of age in grief and loneliness is drawn wtih graceful authenticity. -- Valerie Miner, The New York Times Book Review A startlingly original first novel. Not only do a great many marvelous things happen, they do so in a time and place so untapped that Childress is able to claim the territory as his alone. He has marked himself, at the tender age of twenty-six, as a major new fictional voice. -- Bruce van Wyngarden, Saturday Review

A "lively and engaging" history of the Middle Ages (Dallas Morning News) from the acclaimed historian William Manchester, author of The Last Lion. From tales of chivalrous knights to the barbarity of trial by ordeal, no era has been a greater source of awe, horror, and wonder than the Middle Ages. In handsomely crafted prose, and with the grace and authority of his extraordinary gift for narrative history, William Manchester leads us from a civilization tottering on the brink of collapse to the grandeur of its rebirth: the dense explosion of energy that spawned some of history's greatest poets, philosophers, painters, adventurers, and reformers, as well as some of its most spectacular villains. "Manchester provides easy access to a fascinating age when our modern mentality was just being born." --Chicago Tribune

Chris d'Lacey's wonderful storytelling takes us on a journey with familiar characters - in an unfamiliar place. Evil Aunts, intriguing firebirds and a dangerous universe await in another action-packed, compelling story.

"Horatio Cotton, aka "Bob," has been looking for some combination of spiritual and carnal salvation his entire life. When he steals a self-help book called Magnificent Vibration: Discover Your True Purpose from a bookstore and calls the number scrawled inside the front cover, he discovers that he has a direct line to God, and that God likes to mess with him. Soon enough Bob finds a partner in Alice, a surprisingly sexy and good-humored nun, and they travel from America to Scotland and try to answer questions, such as Why are we here? What is love? Is there a Loch Ness monster? Does God send text messages? MAGNIFICENT VIBRATION is smart, savvy, rambunctious, and hilarious novel, about the biggest questions that one man - or mankind - has ever asked"--

Type “Mikhail Kalashnikov” into Google and the biography of the inventor will come back to you almost at the speed of light. Squeeze the trigger of a Kalashnikov and a bullet is kicked up the barrel by an archaic chemical explosion that would have been quite familiar to Oliver Cromwell or General Custer. The gun—antique, yet contemporary—still dominates the world. Geopolitical events and even consumer culture have been molded by the often-unseen research that firearms evoked. The new science of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton owed much to the Renaissance study of ballistics. But research into making guns and aiming them also brought on the more recent invention of mass production and kickstarted the contemporary field of artificial intelligence. This book follows the history of the gun and its often-unsuspected wider linkages, looking from the first cannons to modern gunnery, and to the yet-to-be-realized electrical futures of rays and beams.

The reigning consensus holds that the combination of free markets and democracy would transform the third world and sweep away the ethnic hatred and religious zealotry associated with underdevelopment. In this revelatory investigation of the true impact of globalization, Yale Law School professor Amy Chua explains why many developing countries are in fact consumed by ethnic violence after adopting free market democracy. Chua shows how in non-Western countries around the globe, free markets have concentrated starkly disproportionate wealth in the hands of a resented ethnic minority. These “market-dominant minorities” – Chinese in Southeast Asia, Croatians in the former Yugoslavia, whites in Latin America and South Africa, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in post-communist Russia – become objects of violent hatred. At the same time, democracy empowers the impoverished majority, unleashing ethnic demagoguery, confiscation, and sometimes genocidal revenge. She also argues that the United States has become the world’s most visible market-dominant minority, a fact that helps explain the rising tide of anti-Americanism around the world. Chua is a friend of globalization, but she urges us to find ways to spread its benefits and curb its most destructive aspects.