The Mark Childress page
Crazy in Alabama
Original catalog copy, G.P. Putnam's Sons edition
The world turns upside down and everything goes a little crazy in Mark Childress's fabulous tale of a hot, restless summer in Alabama and an unforgettable woman who looks for salvation in Hollywood.
"A writer of almost uncanny stylistic ability and clear vision," says Stephen King of Mark Childress. "His eye for detail is extraordinary. It makes you want to holler Oh Yeah!"
Over the course of three very fine novels, Mark Childress has had readers across America hollering Oh Yeah! at his exuberant storytelling, his sixth sense for characterization, and his ability to stir powerful memories. Now, with Crazy in Alabama, Childress delivers the touching and vastly entertaining tale of Peejoe, an orphan boy who comes of age during a racially restless summer in the Deep South, and Lucille, his zany aunt who flees from a soul-numbing marriage -- a union she can't entirely escape in the end. For both Lucille and Peejoe, the summer of '65 will live on as the time when everybody went crazy in Alabama.
By turns puckishly comic and disturbingly poignant, Crazy in Alabama gets everything right, and then some. This is the novel that Childress fans have been waiting for.
"If Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King had written a book together, this would be it. Hilarious and scary!"
-- Fannie Flagg
"CRAZY IN ALABAMA is Mark Childress at his most outrageous, most hilarious, and most moving. Aunt Lucille takes her strange place as one of the South's most unforgettable women, and CRAZY IN ALABAMA is simply an unforgettable book!"
-- Pat Conroy
"In the grand tradition of Harper Lee and Truman Capote, Mark Childress gives us CRAZY IN ALABAMA, a wonderful tale that is both wildly hilarious and painfully frightening. Set in the mid-sixties at the height of racial tensions, Childress takes all of the classic Southern elements and puts his own magical spin on them, emerging with a cast of characters you're not likely to ever forget. CRAZY IN ALABAMA is an extraordinary accomplishment on every level, the least of which being that you will never look at a piece of Tupperware and not be reminded..."
-- Jill McCorkle
