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A Large & Startling Figure
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography
This section features citations for books bearing quotes, or blurbs, from Crews. Often, blurbs share themes or subjects on which Crews has written: autobiography (Owens' My Brother Michael, Wolff's This Boy's Life); bodybuilding (Fussell's Muscle, Morris's Mussels); mid-life crisis, divorce, and dissipation (Dann's Counting Coup, Hemphill's King of the Road, Nagel's No Entry, and Shriver's Double Fault); and lately, Vietnam, veterans, and the Marine Corps (Baker's Nam, Ricks' Making the Corps). Frequently, blurbs appear on the jacket of an author's first novel or story collection. Former students Jay Atkinson, Kevin Canty, Mike Magnuson, and Sterling Watson solicited quotes from Crews for their first books. Other blurbs follow Crews from publisher to publisher—William Morrow, Simon & Schuster, Poseidon Press—pointing out the tendency of agents and editors to promote from within the ranks. Some blurbs recognize the work of a deserving contemporary—Charles Bowden, Douglas Day, Jim Harrison, or Charles Willeford. And on occasion, such blurbs as the ones for Baker's Unhealthful Air, Brown's Big Bad Love, and Hannah's Ray, originate from published reviews.
A Novel.
Back cover: "Here are men who have looked into the eyes of war and who will never be able to look out of their own eyes the same way again. Here is the face of war as it has rarely been shown in literature. The final pages of the book will serve as metaphor for American tearing its own guts out, which is precisely what this country did in Vietnam. Kent Anderson will no doubt take heat for this book, but as a writer, I say, 'Welcome aboard. You're one of us.'" Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Atkinson, Jay.
Back cover: "Talent has struck. Caveman Politics is gutty, powerfully written—from start to finish, my kind of novel. I have a feeling that this is a writer we'll hear from in the future. I send Mr. Atkinson my ultimate praise." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Baker, Elliott.
Back cover: "If Elliot Baker is to be compared to other writers, he must be put into the demented, brilliant company of such men as J. P. Donleavy and Joseph Heller." [from the New York Times book review]. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
The Vietnam War in the Words of the Men and Women Who Fought There.
Blurb from back of the dust jacket: "Here is the whole sorry, tragic catastrophe that was our involvement in Vietnam. It is impossible for me to describe the power of this book. But I promise you what will perhaps be the most memorable reading experience of your life. It is also a view of the war and the boys who fought it that you will not find anywhere else. I cannot recommend this work too highly." [Blurb confirmed by Ken Lopez Bookseller]. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Their Lives in Their Own Words.
Back cover: "Mark Baker has done it again. I thought his previous book, Nam, was the best book I had read on that tragedy. Now in Cops he has given us the most redable, riveting, and memorable book ever written about law enforcement. I don't believe anybody who starts it will be able to put it down." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Prosecutors in Their Own Words.
"Mark Baker has consistently written hardcore, kick-ass books, the kind that might make you miss a night's sleep reading them." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel of Suspense.
Front (and inside front) cover: "Compelling, memorable . . . one of the best reads I've had in years." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "As clean, precise, and satisfying as the bite of a good axe in oak on a cold morning. His knowledge of his subject is profound, and his compassion for the people who live in the pages of The Blind Corral is utterly moving. What a wonderful job of work this is." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Bowden, Charles. Inside flap, top: ". . . a brooding evocation of the late '60s and the early '70s that conjures in the mind and heart the shambles that these years represent." Inside flap, bottom: "Mezcal is also a lyrical meditation upon the ultimate strength of the land, specifically the desert Southwest, and how that; and prevails and endures despite every effort of modern industry and development to rape and savage it in the name of progress. Mezcal lingers in the mind like as only the very best books manage to do." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Bowden, Charles.
Inside back flap: ". . . a brooding evocation of the late 60s and the early 70s that conjures in the mind and heart the shambles that these years represent . . . . Lingers in the mind like as only the very best books manage to do." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Brown, Larry. "Rather like some perfect object one has come across in a wilderness." [See Crews 1990 October 21 Book Reviews]. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "A strong, true voice that speaks with authority and compassion. Larry Brown's work is exceptional by any standards." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Brown, Larry.
Front cover: "Talent has struck." Second inside page: "Larry Brown's work is exceptional by any standards. Talent has struck." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Brown, Larry.
Back cover: "It is my feeling that Brown's voice is distinctive enough to make it impossible to confuse with any other writer . . . . My hope that he will write a lot is entirely selfish, because whatever he writes, I will read." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Butler, Robert Olen.
Unconfirmed. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Stories.
"Kevin Canty is a storm of talent and this book of stories lingers in the mind as only the best fiction does. His imagination is a dark wood with wildlife in it. I cannot remember when I was so impressed by a first book by an unknown writer." Also blurbs by Joy Williams, Padgett Powell, Ann Beattie. Canty was a graduate student in the University of Florida writing program in the late 1980s. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back of jacket recycles blurbs from A Stranger. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Canty, Kevin.
Back of jacket recycles blurbs from A Stranger. Also blurbs by Rick Bass and Jim Harrison. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
and Other Stories.
"Kevin Canty is a storm of talent . . . His imagination is a dark wood with wildlife in it. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Carcaterra, Lorenzo.
First inside page of paperback: "Lorenzo Carcaterra's labor, his pain, and above all, his compassion as a man has given us the great gift of Sleepers. I ended reading this incomparable book with my heart crushed and my eyes blinded by tears." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Dann, Jack.
Back cover: "I love the two old men at the center of this book, one an Indian medicine man. Here at the tag end of their lives, they are out to make some memories, instead of living in the ones from the past. And what memories they make! Theirs is a revolt against death, funny, frantic, and altogether human. They take it to the max: smoke a little dope, drink a lot of whiskey, steal a few cars, and see what the young girls will give up. May we all have such moments, now and at the hour of our death. A hell of a read." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Douglas Day's powers are formidable. Journey of the Wolf is without question the best-written novel I've read in a decade. I knew from the first paragraph that I was in the hands of a master. Everything Day touches comes immediately to life. Dust chokes us. The brutal rocky soil tears our feet. I loved the old man whose life and sense of decency inform this novel. I loved his conviction that a man's dignity insists that he seek the right moment and the right moment place for his death. His story unfolds toward that place with an inevitability that is at once profoundly sad and profoundly satisfying." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder.
Inside cover: "Do yourself a favor, put your money down, and buy this honest and very funny book about bodybuilding, with all its kinks and twists and warts. Mr. Fussell, I congratulate you as a writer." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Man Returns to the Center of His Life.
Back cover: "I can't remember reading a book that moved me more than this one. Maybe it's my age, or my family, or maybe it is my own son gone now to make his own way in the world, but this powerful, honest book brought joy to my heart and tears to my eyes. It shook me in some profound way that I cannot name. But I can thank Charles Gaines for writing it. Thanks, man, for a reading experience that will never leave me." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Gonzales, Laurence.
Back cover: "Talent has struck again. Laurence Gonzales's Jambeaux will steal the night from you. It did for me. I read it through in one sitting and when I closed the book I thought that those people who fear for the fate of the novel ought to go out and but Jambeaux and put their hearts at rest. The ultimate compliment I can pay any writer, I send to Mr. Gonzales: I'll read the next novel he writes." Also blurbs by George Plimpton, Donald Barthelme, Edward Abbey, Clifford Irving, and Studs Terkel. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Graves, Tom.
Back cover: "If you only buy one book this year, this is the one." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Haldeman, Jack C. Back cover: "Put your money down and take home High Steel, a novel of science fiction that lingers in the mind as only the best such writing does . . . One hell of a read." Crews is one of several people credited by the authors for "support, aid, and inspiration." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Hannah, Barry.
"This novel hangs in the memory like a fishhook." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Harrison, Jim.
Front cover blurb: "A singular joy to read." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a story that outruns the covers of the book in which it is contained. Once you read this story, it will be with you forever—this place and these people will live in your heart and in the blood it pumps. I am utterly dumbfounded when a first novel of this quality comes along. I send Peter Hedges the ultimate compliment one writer can send another: I'll surely read the next thing you write." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Hemphill, Paul.
Blurb from rear cover: "Here's a tale that starts in the gut but ultimately comes to live in the heart. I love the old man at the center of King of the Road. I love his courage, his spirit, and his determination to live his life listening only to the dictates of his own blood. Paul Hemphill is and has been for a long time one of the best reads in the country. Put your money down and pick this book up. You'll not be sorry." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Hjortsberg, William.
"William Hjortsberg is a powerful, memorable writer whose books have kept me up through more than one night. Nevermore is a storm of reading pleasure." [Unconfirmed]. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Hjortsberg, William.
Inside front cover: "William Hjortsberg writes fiction the way Leroy Jordan plays football—with controlled abandon—which is to say, with the abandon that only the greatest discipline can release." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Hillary Johnson's Physical Culture will peel you down to the quick and let you see what lives there. It is the single most shattering novel I've read since Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird." Also blurbs by Patrick McGrath and Madison Smartt Bell. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Madison Jones is one of the country's great prose stylists. His ear is tone perfect. His eye for significant detail is that of a master. Last Things lingers in the mind as only fiction of the first water does. Here is a story that is funny and terrible and compelling and memorable. There is not a writer in America whose body of work I admire more than the work Madison Jones has done." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Kalin, Jim.
Back cover: "[This book] gives the hairy belly of most, if not all, of us. Here is a writer to watch." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Michael Knight's Divining Rod is the work of a man we will be reading for years and years to come. What a genuine voice. What a raging talent." Also blurbs by Frederick Busch and Frederick Barthelme. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Mike Magnuson hits the first page running, a torch in either hand, and by the time he has burned through to the other side, he has left a story that is beautiful and terrible and one that lingers in the mind and heart. This is my kind of story." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
McCarthy, Kevin M. (Editor).
"I have read all of these stories and there is not a bad one in the bunch. In a collection of this quality, perhaps, I should not single out one story for praise, but Padgett Powell's story nails it right to the wall. I will keep this collection by my bedside and read from it, more or less, each night. It is that good." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
McLaurin, Tim.
"[P]owerful and compelling." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Southern Boyhood.
Back cover: "This is a book that gives you back in spades whatever it demands of you. Here is a life. Here are the bones that hold the life. Here is the blood that holds and makes the life. Here is an honesty that will make you weep, laugh, grind your teeth and howl at the moon, all of it done—strange to say—with a joy as mysterious and unanswerable as the beating of your own heart. Come find out who you are: come read Keeper of the Moon." Also, blurbs by Roy Blount, Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, and Larry Brown. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Front inside flap: "Here is a richly comic, deeply moving novel by North Carolina writer Tim McLaurin, whose work has already won him a chorus of praise from such writers as James Dickey ('Tim McLaurin is an extraordinary talent'), Lee Smith ('a wonderful writer'), and Harry Crews ('a young writer who has a talent and voice all his own')." Also blurbs by Lee Smith, Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, and James Dickey. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel. Front cover: "Not A Bad Man will make your head and heart sing." Inside front cover: "Not a Bad Man is a novel that will keep you up at nights, a novel by a young writer who cares about language. It will make your head and heart sing. Long after you read the last page, the whole bitter, beautiful, sweet, ugly story of death and the absence of love will live in your memory." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel. Inside back cover:"In the rich storytelling tradition of Harry Crews and Pete Dexter, Mussels is a brawny, bawdy, blackly humorous first novel that marks the impressive debut of a unique voice in contemporary Southern fiction." Back cover: "Philip Quinn Morris's novel Mussels has a voice and vision all its own. A compelling tale by a talent to watch. Buy the book; it does not disappoint." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Morris, Phillip Quinn.
Back cover recycles blurb from Mussels: "A compelling tale by a talent to watch—Mussels has a voice and vision all its own." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Inside front cover: "In the tradition of Harry Crews, No Entry is both black comedy and a deeply spiritual novel of the modern South." Back cover: "Edward Nagel's No Entry has moments of real brilliance. If you care anything at all for literature and hell for leather storytelling, put your money down and take this book home." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Front cover: "A wonderful novel." Back cover: "Here is a wonderful novel filled with real people and real places, a novel that has some of the best dialogue I've read in a very long time." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
The Man and the Artist.
Back cover: "A reader who knows little of Faulkner's work, or perhaps knowns nothing but his name, will still find this book vital, compelling, and memorable. I finished reading in tears, but then I honor and revere the memory of Faulkner and the magic of his work. Here is a life of profound grief, loneliness and tragedy that resulted in an ultimate triumph without parallel in this century. Stephen Oates will always have my deepest gratitude for the work he has done in these pages." Thanks to Steve Newman for providing details about this blurb. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "These pages sing with an energy that is rare and wonderful. Janis Owens has found her voice in My Brother Michael, and that voice is strong and true and all her own. My sincere hope is that this book finds the audience it so richly deserves." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Price, Richard.
"A beautiful, howlingly funny, terrifying vision . . . Price's best work to date, and that's saying a lot." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novella.
Back cover: "This writer knows the country whereof he speaks, its dialect, its mores and folkways. But this is not sociology. It is primitive fiction of the sort one rarely sees. More's the pity. Underneath this violent language and narrative, there is a sweet truth. It deserves to be read." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Ricks, Thomas E.
Inside flap: "I was there. And this is it: Parris Island. In Making the Corps, Thomas Ricks renders the relationship that exists between the Marine Drill Instructor and the recruit as nobody else ever has. But perhaps his greatest contribution in this book is to examine in great detail the distrust—the war, even—that exists between the Corps and today's society. Making the Corps is a book that ought to be on the shelf of every American, and particularly on the shelf of every parent who has a child who may one day, for whatever reason, want to measure himself on Parris Island to see if he has the stuff to be a Marine for the rest of his life, even if he only serves one hitch." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Single blurb on back cover: "Pride of the Bimbos is a strong, sad, funny book which marks the beginning of what will surely be a remarkable career. I send John Sayles the ultimate compliment for a writer: whatever he writes next I'll read." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Sayles, John.
Rear dust jacket blurb recycles quote from Pride of the Bimbos: "'A strong, sad, funny book,' said Harry Crews, 'which marks the beginning of what surely will be a remarkable career.'" Thanks to F.R. Joslin, Bookseller, for providing citation confirmation. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Schott, Max.
Back cover: "Murphy's Romance is that uncommon novel you'll read in a single sitting and soon find the time to sit and read all over again. It is a closely observed, anecdotal tale, spining out the lives, large and small, of many people—all in language as concrete, economical, and memorable as poetry." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Schneider, Russ.
"While this novel only deals with two small cities under siege by the Russians on the Eastern Front in World War II, it manages to give us the face of all war, the horror, blood, exhaustion, hunger, and sacrifice of human conflict wherever it has raged over the face of the world. This darkly painful narrative by a writer himself too early dead will change you forever. Such is art on it's highest level." [Unconfirmed] Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Schulman, Sarah.
From back cover: "Empathy is hard-edged and soft in all the ways that matter, and lingers in the mind as only the pain of love ever does." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel. Inside back cover: "Harry Crews called Memories of Amnesia '. . . a riveting human document . . . an extraordinary performance.'" "Back cover: "Memories of Amnesia is a riveting human document. An extraordinary performance. Take this book home; you won't be disappointed." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Inside front cover: "I can only hope that with Double Fault Lionel Shriver receives the acclaim she has so long deserved. This book is about the small and large ways we hurt each other in the greatest competition on the face of the earth: Love. Buy it. It belongs on that shelf of books you will return to again and again." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Skellings, Edmund.
Inside cover: "First water." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Poems.
Back cover: "Skellings is a fine inside cat. He can let language do. There are several around who can make language do, but only ones of the first water can let language do. That may be a fine distinction, but only fine distinctions count." Also blurbs by Norman Mailer and William Stafford. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Here is a new novel by a new writer which is occasion for celebration. It is rare when a first novel is as memorable and compelling as In the Matter of Billy K. As only the best fiction does, it lingers in the mind and the heart after the last page is turned." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Stories.
Back cover: "Head is a collection of stories that is tight, magnificently crafted, a collection that bears the mark of a master's hand. If you only buy one book this year, buy Head. It will leave an indelible imprint on your mind, memory, and heart." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Not many come down the pike these days as fine as David Wagoner's The Road to Many a Wonder. The book is a joyous celebration of innocence and courage and I, for one, loved it." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "Robert Ward's novel Red Baker takes the abstraction 'unemployment' that we so easily bandy about and turns it into the blood and bone of people who are very much alive. Red Baker is a wrenching and highly rewarding experience. We are all in Robert Ward's debt for going the distance to write it." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
From the inside cover: "A novel of conscience and consequence, Weep No More My Brother is the story of a man losing himself because he cannot deny the demands of his blood. It is an auspicious beginning for a young novelist from whom we have every right to expect equally fine stories in the future. I read Weep No More My Brother in a single sitting and found it a deeply felt story, one that is moving and satisfying." Blurbs also by John Ciardi, Reynolds Price, and Andrew Lytle. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Wheeler, Charles.
Front inside flap: "Snakewalk is the work of a raging, courageous, defiant talent, curiously mixed with compassionate humor. Here's a voice and angle of vision that makes new on every page the old mystery of being human. Charles Wheeler, wherever you are, I hope you're working, because I'm down here not far from the Okefenokee Swamp waiting for your next one." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Whiteford, Merry.
Back cover: "If Wishes Were Horses lives up to the shining promise of Merry Whiteford's first two novels. Here is a narrative that will joyously break your heart. A writer to watch." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Willeford, Charles.
"Charles Willeford renders the sport [of cockfighting] with such knowledge and attention to detail . . . that I had the almost inexpressible impression of being on my knees again beside the great cockfighting pits of the southern circuit." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Memoir.
From back cover: "Flannery O'Connor said anybody who survived his childhood had enough to write out for the rest of his life. Tobias Wolff did survive his childhood, and has managed to write some remarkable books, among them The Barracks Thief, my favorite. But he has done nothing to equal This Boy's Life, and it may come to pass that he never will. If that is the case, it will be career enough, accomplishment enough. This Boy's Life is by turns touching, frightening, and that rare thing in literature, a concrete, specific, sensual world through which walks a boy with real blood in his veins, blood filled with dreams and hopes and, at times, despair. The magic is that it is often despair that makes the realization of dreams and hopes possible." Also blurbs by Richard Ford and Thomas McGuane. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
A Novel.
Back cover: "What a marvel, what a mystery it is that by carefully detailing a monstrous death Hilma Wolitzer manages to create and sustain a tender and beautiful life. There are passages in this novel that move me as much as anything I've ever read. It deals with the single great theme of all literature: love and the absence of love." Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
Wyatt, Wyatt.
Blurb from lower part of front cover: "A remarkable first novel, the whole of which I read in a single, delightful sitting. God bless and keep the storytellers, those of the hard narrative line, spinning itself out in page after page of language solid and gamy as flesh. I salute Mr. Wyatt for being such a one. I champ at the bit waiting to see what he will give us next." [Blurb confirmed by Ken Lopez Bookseller]. Check availability from Amazon (paid link)
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