Gospel Singer

The poor town of Enigma, Georgia awaits the return of its most famous son - the Gospel Singer. With the voice of an angel and, it is said, the touch of a healer, he is fresh from the cover of LIFE and the cheers of the Carnegie Hall crowd. And yet, for all his fame, something drives him back to his obscure past, to small-town idolization and half-forgotten deeds. There, before the crowds that have gathered at his feet, he will reveal the cruelty at the heart of his act ...

The Gospel Singer, Harry Crews' extraordinary debut novel, is at once a surreal investigation into the nature of the American South, as well as an intricate mediation on faith and its place in the community.

Reviews

“Flannery O’Connor on steroids.”
—John Williams, GQ
 
“I don’t know where [Harry Crews’s] narrative magic comes from, but it is firmly there.”
—Joseph Heller

“…a bona fide Southern writer in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, whose unvarnished language and absurdist take on life among the lower rungs of the region’s social ladder [is] shot through with a rough-and-tumble kind of empathy….it was with great pleasure that I spent last weekend reading The Gospel Singer,… a darkly funny tragedy…. The world he writes about is violent and ruthless….But there’s a point to Crews’ madness, and always present is a throughline of empathy…”
—Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Critics and awards anoint some authors as legends. Others depend on word-of-mouth and prose that stands the test of time….There is nothing folksy, never mind pastoral or genteel, about Crews. With caustic and fabulist writing, he exhumed the ghosts of America’s original sin…..Crews captured the raw essence of humanity in both fiction and nonfiction. Side by side, these reissues form the complete picture of an imperfect man who charged hard into extremes to escape his cultural inheritance.”
—Lauren Leblanc, Los Angeles Times