(Fiction; Graham Press, 2006)
For the last several decades, American novelist Harry Crews has enjoyed a small cadre of loyal readers who appreciate his violent, muscular prose. Over his career, critics have voiced careful appreciation of his technique, and he has summoned a near-cult following, but his latest book, An American Family, met with almost complete silence when it appeared in 2006. It’s a short, splendid narrative full of Crews hallmarks—the New versus the Old South, pit bulls, violence, and sex—written in Crews’s deceptively simple prose, which both bullies and seduces the reader.
