Kim Edwards was born in Killeen, Texas. She grew up in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York and graduated from Colgate University and The University of Iowa, where she earned an MFA in fiction and an MA in linguistics. She is the author of a story collection, The Secrets of a Fire King (1997), which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her stories have been published in The Paris Review, Story, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, and many other periodicals. She has received many awards for the short story as well, including a Pushcart Prize, the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and inclusion in both The Best American Short Stories and the Symphony Space program ‘Selected Shorts.’ She is the recipient of grants from the Pennsylvania and Kentucky Arts Councils, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter (2005), her first novel, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Award pick and became a word-of-mouth best-seller, spending 122 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, 20 of those weeks at #1. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter won the Kentucky Literary Award and the British Book Award, and was chosen as Book of the Year for 2006 by USA Today. Her second novel, The Lake of Dreams (2011), an Independent Booksellers pick, was also an international best seller. Her work has been published in more than 32 countries. Currently, Kim is working on a new novel, as well as a collection of related stories.
-
The Secrets of a Fire KingStoriesFrom"The Way It Felt To Be Falling"
I couldn’t move. The ground was tiny, an aerial map, rich in detail, and the wind tugged at my feet. What were the commands? Arch, I whispered. Arch arch arch. That was all I could remember. I stood up, gripping the side of the opening, my feet balanced on the metal bar beneath the doorway, resisting the steady rush of wind. The jumpmaster shouted again. I felt the pressure of his fingers. And then I was gone. I left the plane behind me and fell into the air.
The Secrets of a Fire King:Stories -
The Secrets of a Fire KingThe Secrets of a Fire KingStoriesFrom"The Secrets of a Fire King"
Of all the acts in that traveling show—the snake man, the acrobats, the sword swallower, the luminous dancers—the Fire King was the one who held me fast. In his flames I saw the beauty, the power mingled with the danger. He could pour molten lead into his mouth, then spit out solid metal nuggets. He ate burning coals with a fork as if they were a pile of new potatoes. I had hung around to see if he was scarred in secret places, and I had pestered him so much, and so insistently, that when I showed up at his door one night with everything I owned, he simply waved a weary arm and took me on as an apprentice. He was a skilled old man, but he was a drunkard too, and although he never missed a show, there came a day when he inhaled accidently while chewing on a wad of burning cotton, and seared his lungs, and died.
The Secrets of a Fire King:Stories -
The Secrets of a Fire KingStoriesFrom"The Invitation"
From each stake in the ground to each new mango tree, bridging the air over the circles of poison Jamal had put down just that morning, there was a dark, quivering line. Joyce blinked, and when the illusion didn’t go away, she opened the screen to look more closely. Lines of ants were walking through the air. But it was not air, she realized, it was the fishing line Jamal had used to stake the trees, so transparent that she would not have seen it except for the ants. They were the large red ants, so dense and steady they seemed more substantial than the fishing wire itself. Joyce held herself still, as if a single motion would shatter something fragile. She hardly breathed, watching the steady progress of the ants. They were working very hard, each one excavating, than carrying away, the very heart of her trees.
The Secrets of a Fire King:Stories
“Edwards is a born novelist . . . The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is rich with psychological detail and the nuances of human connection. [An] extraordinary debut.” —Chicago Tribune
“This tragedy of a man who thinks he can control how lives are redirected is as moving as the story of his nurse, who knows that her love can bless a damaged life . . . Anyone would be struck by the extraordinary power and sympathy of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter.” —The Washington Post
“Masterfully written . . . a compelling story that explores universal themes: the secrets we harbor, even from those we love; our ability to rationalize all manner of lies; and our fear that there will always be something unknowable about the people we love most.” —The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [on The Memory Keeper’s Daughter]
Selected Works
