One morning a young wanderer wakes up to see a band of karate students engaged in deadly combat. Seduced by the sheer impossibility of their feats, and by the stunning female brown belt in their midst, he is soon absorbed into their world—in which the spirit of karate supplants all else.

“A fitting celebration of man’s search for absolutes . . . [Crews’s] subject is man in the microcosm of the freak show, a performer in a species of southern Gothic carnival where the only salvation is his continuing erratic quest for The Way and The Way is as dark and elusive as the picaresque surroundings are bright. . . . Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit is an intense and dazzling book.”—Maxine Kumin

“The novel takes off, in the manner of a fire storm, rushing at amazing speed, eating up the oxygen, scorching everything it touches. . . . [Crews’s] stock in trade is the unexpected. His humor produces something between a laugh and a gasp, and he writes with a hand as sure, tough and trained as [a black belt’s] destructive paws. He is always on his own, absolutely sure of himself, and very good.” —The New York Times Book Review

Acclaimed as “a comic novelist of magnificent gifts” (National Review), a “verbal alchemist” (Kirkus Reviews), “a natch’ral bom teller of tales, a spinner of dreams” (Los Angeles Times), and “amadgenius” (Dan Wakefield), Harry Crews has been a student of the martial arts and is the author of ten books including Car and A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. He lives and teaches in Florida.

From Kirkus Reviews

Harry Crews is a verbal alchemist whose plots can leave you hanging your hat on the outer reaches of insanity and calling it home. Someday someone will be forced to write a thesis on him. In an attempt to bring it all together -- his excesses -- John Kaimon "got very little sleep because the members of the motorcycle gang circumcised him, raped his mouth, anus and armpits and did some other things to him that he had never thought of"; and his simplicity: "I don't know what this place is like around here, but I've found in most cities people'll give you for a day's begging about what you could make for a day's work. I mean I usually make about sixteen dollars for an eight-hour beg." In reluctant summation this plot is about Faulkner fan John Kaimon getting mixed up with the Ultimate Tranquility group, an "Outlaw" Karate set that worships "Jefferson Davis Munroe" (the midget protagonist of This Thing Don't Lead to Heaven) and especially Gaye Nell Odell, a brown belted beauty who divides her time between Kartekas and Beauty Contests and who teaches in a dried out swimming pool in an abandoned motel. But that's not even the beginning, middle, or end. . . . Mr. Crews is a master of the uncommonplace and consistently fascinating.

Now from the author the Washington Post Book World calls "the dark chronicler of human vanity and folly" comes Celebration. The newest black comedy from Harry Crews is a biting, brilliant commentary set in a Florida rest-home gulag where the over-sixty-five set checks its dignity, self-esteem, and social security numbers at the door.

Forever and Forever is the aptly named retreat, populated by a motley crew of forgotten wives and ruined men who are waiting for death while working on their tans. The leader of this group is Stump, whose lost arm paid for Forever and Forever, and who believes the silent desperation that infuses the trailer park masks the fact that Forever and Forever is truly a small piece of hell on earth.

This ironic silence is shattered by the entrance of a beautiful young bombshell. Too Much is her name, and that is exactly what she is. This walking bonfire awakens long dead appetites in the inhabitants of Forever and Forever, reminding them of what they once were and can be again -- alive.

"Dark and sometimes shocking ... Wonderfully ribald and deeply humame." —Gary Dretzka, Chicago Tribune

"...another savage satire with the usual Crewsian elements: grotesque characters, bizarre situations, and black humor." —Library Journal

Crews is a Rabelaisian satirist who toys with the more gothic aspects of southern literature, particularly in this kinky tale. Readers will know that they've entered the realm of the absurd as soon as they meet Too Much, a flexible and lusty beauty right out of Lil' Abner, tight cutoffs, big boobs, and all. Too Much descends on a Florida trailer park called Forever and Forever like a hurricane, riling everyone at this purgatory for old folks who are too raggedy to enjoy retirement but not quite broken down enough for a rest home. Too Much easily seduces Stump, the bitter, one-handed vet who owns this depressing settlement, then unceremoniously deposes him while stirring up long-forgotten appetites in the Old Ones, with her five-alarm body and nihilistic faith in what she calls the "chance of ultimate possibility." Crews is funny, his plot is nearly surreal, and his playing with our notions of good and evil is clever and entertaining, but this is, at base, a very silly novel. —Donna Seaman

From Kirkus Reviews

Mr. Crews' first two novels, The Gospel Singer and Naked In Garden Hills, established him as a superb writer of the absurd. This one has the same bizarre elements. It's set in the "Senior Club," an old people's home run by Axel, an enormous woman dominated by her midget masseur, Jefferson Davis, a dwarf who has convinced everyone that his hands hold the power of life. An accidental newcomer is Carlita, a Spanish-speaking Negro that no one can understand; particularly since her speech is punctuated with voodoo incantations. Jefferson Davis becomes convinced that she can "magic him" to full height. Another arrival is Junior Bledsoe, seller of cemetery plots who struck gold in St. Petersburg and is determined to do the same in the"Club." Every scene is both ridiculous and real, achingly funny and marvelously poignant. The author can make the loss of an old man's last tooth a cameo drama. Unfortunately the ending is abrupt and oddly disappointing. But Mr. Crews is a dazzling, lasting talent.

When Eugene Talmadge Biggs leaves rural Georgia to seek his fortune in the wider world, he finds that world at his feet almost too quickly. Eugene, it soon becomes clear, is a boxer of uncommon promise, an athlete of such natural grace, agility, and power that his rise to a championship seems almost unquestioned— until he discovers during a routine match that he has a glass jaw. That jaw is in fact so freak­ishly vulnerable that Eugene realizes he can punch himself unconscious, a skill that he begins to exploit publicly and that quickly brings him notoriety as The Knockout Artist.

Harry Crews’s extraordinary new novel is the story of his hero’s career in the New Orleans underworld, whose regulars have long since checked their morals at the door, and where success is measured by how many people are under one’s control. Set loose in this arena, Eugene becomes a sensation, the perfect victim who decrees his own punishment over and over again. As his fame spreads, he is taken up by a mysterious trainer named Jake, a min­ion of a perverse tycoon named Oyster Boy; he is taken in as a lover by Charity, an earnest psychology graduate student for whom Eugene is the perfect subject; he finds himself drawn more tightly into the city’s poisonous orbit of tawdry sex clubs, fantastic deals, and private parties where every whim is indulged. The day comes, however, when Eugene must confront his self-respect, which arrives in the person of an immensely talented young Cajun fighter—an innocent in whom he recognizes something of what he had once been. When The Knockout Artist becomes a role he can no longer play, he sets out to claim his freedom, and wins it in an unforgettable climax.

The Knockout Artist is virtuoso Crews—as mordantly funny as it is unflinching in the face of every foible of bedraggled humanity. And, remarkably, it is a story about love as only one of our great writers can present it: often misguided, sometimes destructive, but ultimately the only path toward values that are clear and true.

From Publishers Weekly

Crews, one of the most inventive practitioners in modern American letters, returns to a milieu that has long fascinated him: the seedy world of fighters and musclemen. Eugene Talmadge Biggs, ex-farmboy and ex-boxer (he won 13 fights and lost the next four by knockouts), knows an amazing trickhe can knock himself out with one punch to the jaw. Abandoned by his manager, Crews's glass-jawed hero has to support himself by exhibiting his trick at parties. After 73 self-inflicted KO's, the routine gets a little wearing. Meanwhile, Eugene is taken up by Charity, a rich, all-but-the-dissertation Ph.D. candidate bent on constructing a thesis that relates every fact in the world to every other fact. She thinks Eugene and his prizefighting friends are a gold mine of information for this dubious project. A brilliant specialist in black humor, Crews delivers the goods once again. His deadpan prose style is uncannily effective in meshing the surreal and everyday life. While the characters are mainly freaks, they come across so directly, often with an affecting sweetness, that they acquire extraordinary vibrancy. Crews is a modernist all right, but he isn't a facile one. The moral here and elsewhere in his work is old-fashioned: to thine own self be true.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A superbly crafted novel of deceptions and darkness, this look at the underside of a strange group in New Orleans moves inexorably toward a stunning climax. Eugene Gibbs, a failed boxer, becomes popular on the kinky circuit and is taken in hand by Charity, a wealthy girl who beds him. Eugene is drawn into the circle of another boxer, his addict girlfriend, a hooker/lesbian, and a wealthy businessman who gets his kicks by controlling people by day and being led about with a leash by night. Basically decent, Eugene is tormented because he is deceived and let down by everyone, except a young boxer he is training. Characterization, incidents, and tone are all beautifully sustained in this unusual book. R. H. Donahugh, Youngstown and Mahoning Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

“God bless Harry Crews, America’s best writer. He’ll break your heart but he’ll always bring you love. They just don’t make’em like this anymore.” -Thurston Moore/Sonic Youth

AN AMERICAN FAMILY: The Baby With The Curious Markings is Harry Crews’ most savage and disturbing book yet. Readers of the author’s previous 22 books are in for another shocking and original treat. Make no mistake, this is a raw and powerful novel. Here is Harry Crews at his cranked-up best, at war with the insane crackpots of “the damned human race.”

Harry Crews has been praised by writers, critics and readers for nearly 40 years. AN AMERICAN FAMILY demonstrates the full force of his creative powers and reinforces the undying importance of his remarkable literary career.

From Publishers Weekly

Set in what appears to be the contemporary South, this twisted tale of violence and passion from Crews (The Gospel Singer) focuses on the domestic conflicts facing Major Melton, a former marine and junior college professor. Melton's discovery of an unusual birthmark on his baby son's private parts leads him to suspect his wife of an affair—and to a series of brutal episodes involving pit bulls and a hanging. The odd ending will leave many wondering what the point of it all was. Fans of Southern gothic at its most gruesome will be pleased, but mainstream crime readers are unlikely to be satisfied.

From Booklist

Crews is one of a select group of writers who have received significant praise from academic literary critics (he has been the focus of about a dozen dissertations and a special issue of Southern Quarterly) and yet can remain confident that their books will be squirreled away in the recesses of public libraries by engrossed teenagers (some of whom grow up to become literary critics). Crews' latest testosterone--fueled trance of cryptic meaning and freakish violence revolves around Major Melton, a marine-turned-English-professor protagonist who finds a suspicious birthmark on his infant son's genitalia and suspects his wife of infidelity. A violent run-in with his in-laws and some pit bulls begins the carnage, which quickly escalates into a grotesquely Freudian revenge fantasy. Between splatters, Crews revisits some familiar themes--scars, dogs, karate, physical pain, regret--and continues the obsessive examination of complicated blood relationships that has defined his career. Although those new to Crews may be shocked by the entire book, his die-hard fans will be shocked merely by the unfamiliar notions of reconciliation that shape its ending.

In Naked in Garden Hills, Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit, and Car, Harry Crews, with his superb novelistic gifts, wrote of the demonic and the bizarre, in what The New York Times Book Review has called a “Hieronymus Bosch landscape.” Now, in The Hawk Is Dying, he moves to a different landscape, populated by men and women who are above all ordinary, whose battle against the “nothing period” of being alive makes them at once recognizable, familiar, and real.

At the heart of the book is George Gattling of Gainesville, Florida, fighting the boredom, the excruciating unimportance, of his existence. He has a successful custom-seatcover business, a $60,000 ranch-style home, a family of sorts—his sister Precious, who lies in bed reading aloud the “Ask Them Yourselves” questions in Family Weekly, her son Fred, who every now and then utters one word like “cork” or “toe” and is definitely either retarded or a genius; and Betty, a psychology major whose actual study is copulation.

And he has his hawk.

The hawk is the mirror for all of George’s held-in passions. It goes with him everywhere—to breakfast, to Betty’s bed, to a funeral home at four in the morning. When the hawk at last springs from his arm, prompted by the thought of freedom, swooping for its prey, life will become exciting! animated! tumultuous! . . . and George will have finally escaped the expected and the everyday entering into the immediate, where the senses are quickly awakened and emotions are unrestrained.

In a story filled with scenes that are funny and touching and wonderfully bawdy, Harry Crews has captured the human spirit searching for that Supreme Something which will banish all “dead ends” forever, which will promise—virtually guarantee— the rapturous beginning of Life.

Scar Lover is a miraculous, true-to-the-bone story of love and redemption, at once a classic southern novel and purely, unmistakably, Harry Crews.

Running from a past that has scarred and blamed him, and a tragic accident that has destroyed his family, Pete Butcher avoids all personal contact. Then Sarah Leemer, the oddly beautiful girl next door, walks into his life. Slowly, sweetly, and with a determination almost Faulknerian in its ferocity, Sarah pulls Pete back into life and into the ever increasing complications of love, family, death, and deliverance. For Sarah has made Pete her own, and as she takes her claim, we see the miraculous power of love without boundaries or fear.

"Reading a Crews novel is like watching a savage brawl on top of a derailed train careening toward a cliff!" -Miami Herald

“With an effortless ear for dialect, mood and atmosphere, Harry Crews has drawn a deft portrait of tenderness with his typically savage strokes.” —Seattle Times

“Pure gold, pure Harry Crews, with plenty of the grim humor and enraged charity that have become his trademark.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Imagine William Faulkner in a fright wig or Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor strapped side by side on a roller coaster, and you have Harry Crews writing Southern gothic....Scar Lover works a wacky kind of magic.”—Time

Although this demented and darkly humorous tale is billed as Crews's ( Body ) "most mainstream" novel, rest assured he hasn't gotten there quite yet. Acerbic college-dropout Pete Butcher loathes himself for accidentally causing his little brother brain damage with a claw hammer, and he is haunted by the sight of the dual dents on the child's forehead. On his way to a Jacksonville, Fla., warehouse--where he works with a Rastafarian whose wife repeatedly brands him to commemorate each year they are together--Pete encounters Sarah Leemer, a handsome, mesmerizing young woman with a golfball-like lump in her breast. Against his better judgment, he and Sarah become lovers and he is welcomed into her family, which includes a mentally unhinged mother who has just had a radical mastectomy and a father who complains of a bad heart "the size of a watermelon." The suffering foursome have just achieved an uneasy peace when tragedy strikes them anew, launching its survivors into a gruesome, comical, grimly poetic night of graphic death and Rasta remedies. Pete's sudden responsibility to the Leemers serves to expiate his guilt over his brother; Crews admirably sustains his theme of disfigurement and healing, and if the finale is slightly ambiguous it still bears its author's trademark perverse twist.

From Library Journal

When Pete Butcher ends up in Jacksonville, Florida, he carries with him emotional scars from a devastated family life that cause him to recoil from the strangers he meets daily. Pete just wants to be left alone, but he has landed himself in the middle of a carnival of characters, especially Sarah Leamer, who has staked a claim to Pete. Pete is thus reluctantly drawn into her family's own tragic affairs. Through Sarah, Pete confronts life, death, and, ultimately, his own greatest scar. In the meantime, Pete befriends Burnt George, a co-worker and Rastafarian who carries his own horseshoe-shaped scars seared into his back. Crews darkly comic tale gives a disturbingly accurate portrayal of characters from the rural South, each fiercely shaped by sweat, grit, and cruel hardship. Although the plot becomes very strained at points, Scar Lover will not disappoint Crews's fans.

“As semimythic, mad-writer-guys go, only Cormac McCarthy can rival Georgia-born Harry Crews on the contemporary American scene.” –Glen Hirshberg, Seattle Weekly

Hickum Looney is determined to win Soaps For Life’s annual sales contest- and this year he has an edge. Looney has found that ideal customer: the proverbial little old lady, who swallows all his patter, introduces him to all her friends, and helps him fill a record number of order books. But before he can claim the Cadillac, the trip to Disney World, and the $2,000 in cash as his own, Looney must contend with the Boss, a man who outsells his own salesmen year after year.

Harry Crews turns the classic rags-to-riches story on its head in this hilarious saga of the trials and tribulations of a beleaguered salesman.

“The Mulching of America is the funniest book ever written about a door-to-door soap salesman. Not just funny either. Savage. Dealing hyperbole with both hands. Harry Crews bubbles to the surface again with the sort of satire that makes Swift look slow.” -Dick Roraback, The Washington Post Book World

“The Florida author has built a nineteen-book career by writing—piercingly, sympa­thetically and never, ever condescendingly—about people who are not normal in the safe, sanitary sense of the word. Crews gives them an understanding, humor­ous voice that rings like a burlesque combination of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor.” – Jeff Baker, Oregonian

“A roller-coaster-ride of a novel, "neck deep in crazy,” … disgusting and grotesque.” – Kirkus Reviews

From Library Journal

Traveling salesman Hickum Looney has been toiling 25 years with the Soaps for Life Company to be the best salesman in the outfit. After one especially good day of door-to-door sales, Hickum figures he can easily win the annual Soaps for Life sales contest. But the Boss, a manic, hare-lipped figure who is part Norman Vincent Peale, part Jim Bakker, and part Adolf Hitler, has always won the contest, and he has other plans for Hickum Looney and Soaps for Life. Along the way to fame and misfortune, Hickum meets up with the typical cast of Crews's misfits: Gaye Nell Odell, a prostitute and karate expert whose ability to shoot a pistol renders one of Hickum's enemies toeless; Crews's perennial character, former bodybuilder Russell Muscle (e.g., Body, 8/90), now the Boss's masseur; and the Boss's chauffeur, Pierre LaFarge, a former convict with unconventional sexual appetites. For a brief moment after he and Gaye Nell become lovers, Hickum's flame of success flickers steadily only to be extinguished by the strong winds of the Boss's company plan. At its best, Crews's writing is a two-edged sword that slashes with its razor-thin hilarity while slicing open the underside of the New South to expose its depravity and hollowness. This novel is indeed one of his best.
--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.