Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Each piece is remarkable on its own, and the book takes special advantage of the illumination afforded by grouping the essays with the fiction in particular ways....The book promises to provide new insights to confirmed fans, as well as a valuable introduction for the uninitiated." Martha Schoolman, Booklist
Review
"Would-be authors are traditionally exhorted to 'write about what they know', but Crews has taken the injunction more seriously, more feelingly, than most. Just about the first thing he tells us in his introduction is that he comes from a background in which the very idea of writing fiction stories the author knows to be untrue is in itself profoundly suspect....In the plain, spare style of Crews's work, a deep distrust of abstraction and artifice, even of lyricism, is always evident: if Crews feels when writing fiction that he is slipping out of his own skin and into somebody else's, he writes as one who, scalded all over in a childhood accident, watched in terror as the skin slithered from his body in sheets." Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
From Simon & Schuster, Classic Crews is a collection of works from the master Harry Crews, including his memoir and short stories. Collected here is the best of Harry Crews: his astoundingly beautiful memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place; two if his most memorable novels, Car and The Gypsy's Curse; and three masterly essays, Climbing the Tower, The Car, and Fathers, Sons and Blood, as well as a new introduction to these works by Crews himself.
About the Author
Harry Crews was born in 1935, in Bacon County, Georgia. He has been a carnival barker, light-heavyweight boxer and a bartender. He left Georgia at the age of 18 to pull a hitch in the Marine Corps during the Korean Conflict. With the GI Bill he went to the University of Florida and upon graduation started to write, the only thing he'd ever wanted to do, and never looked back. Crews has been described as "a dark chronicler of human vanity and folly," an artist in depicting "the world of the misbegotten, the freaks and misfits and malcontents in whose strange doings Crews is able to locate a genuine if quirky humanity" ( Washington Post Book World) . "Harry Crews has a talent all his own," remarked American novelist Norman Mailer of Crews's 1976 novel A Feast of Snakes . "He begins where James Dickey left off." He has 21 titles: novels, collections of essays, a memoir and a play entitled Blood Issue , commissioned by and first produced at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and published by the University of Kentucky in a volume entitled Southern Playwrights. Two one hour documentaries have been made of this life and work, one by PBS entitled