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    A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations
    A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations
    A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations
    Ebook341 pages5 hours

    A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations

    By David Keffer

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    Let it be said that, even in simplicity, there is the opportunity to become befuddled and to lose one's way. A Memory of Fire follows a simple man who was guided by his conscience and natural impulses until he encountered a homeless man who was simultaneously damaged, vulnerable, enigmatic and monstrous. With the squatter in the lead, the man finds himself engaged in a cross-country quest, the object of which has never been thoroughly explained to him and in which he begins through gradual degrees of disorientation to lose sight of his guiding principles. Eventually, he must choose whether to press forward, continuing to aid the squatter, despite the threat of fire, real and imagined, or to abandon the quest and return home, if such a path still exists for him.

    Written in a tone balancing the vernacular and the philosophical, A Memory of Fire presents a straightforward narrative, in which the innocent and the experienced collide and neither emerges unchanged.

    Although the author had apparently completely lost all memory of it, Poison Pie, Man of the Mushroom People, makes his literary debut in A Memory of Fire. Perhaps it is the presence of his mushroom-inspired Shakespearean sonnets that prompted the author to forget.

    A Memory of Fire was written from April to September of 1997, when the author was working as a post-doctoral fellow in the Theoretical Chemistry Group at the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Southeast Washington, DC.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDavid Keffer
    Release dateJun 17, 2013
    ISBN9781301170661
    A Memory of Fire: A Novel of Indeterminate Conflagrations
    Author

    David Keffer

    David J. Keffer was born in Kansas City, Missouri. He pursued a technical education earning a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota. After a year as a post-doctoral scholar at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., he began his career as an engineering professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where he remains today. He has published about 100 technical papers in archival journals. He was awarded a Fulbright Grant to learn and to teach about sustainability in Seoul, Korea.Outside of engineering, David Keffer studied world literature and creative writing. He has published analytical articles on the works of Primo Levi and Kobo Abé. He created various reading aids to several classical Chinese novels. Over the past two decades, David Keffer has been active writing novels, poetry and stories. Several novels and illustrated stories are available from the Poison Pie Publishing House at http://www.poisonpie.com.Beginning in 2012, David Keffer began teaching a course on the subject of non-idiomatic improvisational music, of which he is a devoted listener and a topic which has led aided him on an investigation of a literature of non-idiomatic improvisation.David Keffer lives in Knoxville, Tennessee with his wife, Lynn, and two children. As a family, they enjoy hiking through the local mountains and are always on the look-out for poison pie and other ambivalent mushrooms that dot the landscape.

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      A Memory of Fire - David Keffer

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