The Gospel Singer
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Book Overview
"Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny." - Carl Hiaasen A Penguin Classic
Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is being held at tenuous bay from a lynch mob. As Harry Crews's first novel unfolds, the Gospel Singer is forced to give way to his torment, and in doing so he reveals to the believers who have gathered at his feet just how little he is God's man, and how much he has contributed to the corruption of each of them.
Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is being held at tenuous bay from a lynch mob. As Harry Crews's first novel unfolds, the Gospel Singer is forced to give way to his torment, and in doing so he reveals to the believers who have gathered at his feet just how little he is God's man, and how much he has contributed to the corruption of each of them.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:0143135090
ISBN13:9780143135098
Release Date:March 2022
Publisher:Penguin Publishing Group
Length:224 Pages
Weight:0.44 lbs.
Dimensions:0.7" x 5.0" x 7.6"
Customer Reviews
2 ratings
Oh, give me MORE!!!
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 17 years ago
A wonderful read.... I could see the charaters in this novel..and smell the sells, be they ever so foul.. A better southern writer..??..Not in my generation... He is the master of southern dirt roots.. He has lived it, breathed it, and lived totell the tales.. That, in itself, is a miracle.. Loved it and all of the rest of his works..
A surrealistic pillow of hot, heavy air...
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 26 years ago
When it comes to sex-God-and-violence books, Harry Crews is one of the best contemporary southern gothic novelists that's still pumping out good books.And after all, this is his first novel. No pretension, no inarticulate naivete, just a gradually and very-well developed plot that reminded me at times of book four of Vergil's Aeneid.Perhaps the most intriguing element of the book was the complete lack of introduction; Crews assumes from the origin that you'll have a good idea what he's talking about (and enjoy it more) if he simply begins not with alot of character-developing tedium but rather launches into a self-explanatory dialogue that makes everything all the more real, dialectical spellings and all. Although Crews seems to "carve 'suk for honesty' on [his] chest," the entire atmosphere of the seting, Enigma, Georgia, is exaggerated to a squalid surreality of a seemingly ordinary impoverished deep-South town. Crews' sparse yet vibrant depictions of southern life ensure decades prior that, well, he's not gonna stop writing anytime soon.
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