Celebration

As the author of an outrageously funny satire entitled "The Misadventures of Sister Mary Olga Fortitude," I especially appreciated this zany satire. Harry Crews is a gifted author with a bent for dark as well as outrageous humor. His characters are outlandish as are mine. I loved every minute of this book. This is a story of a group of human souls who are trapped in a trailer park. They are basically waiting to die. Then along comes a beautiful and delightfully vibrant spirit named Too Much who wakes them up to the fact that they can indeed enjoy life. If you want to take a walk on the wild side of life and get a healthy dose of laughs along the way, this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it. You will too. Davis Aujourd'hui, author of "The Misadventures of Sister Mary Olga Fortitude"

Along with Feast of Snakes, Celebration is why I love Harry Crews. It's powerful, mythic and rings true to modern Southern characters from bad backgrounds. Celebrations turns a trailerpark into the most fascinating novel setting I've encountered in years.

Don't pay any attention to the other reviewers, this is a Gawd-Almighty masterpiece, the book Crews was born to write. Besides that, Too Much is real, I know a woman just like her, and I do live in Florida.If you like your Florida literature serious and literary, yet hilarious, or if you'd ever wondered what would happen if Flannery O'Connor dropped acid, read Celebration!

While not the best Crews book i have read, and not the book i would recommend to a first time Crews reader, this still is a winner. You can just tell that Crews is feeling his age getting to him, which makes this seem more heart-felt. Yes, it is slightly more ridiculous than usual, but it is more of the same pained bizarre cruelty that stabs at the heart of human nature. So far, Crews is the person who has been able to capture that better than anyone else.

As someone else noted, this probably isn't the best introduction to Crews' work for the uninitiated and the faint of heart. But for hardcore Crews readers and others who can look the human beast in the face without flinching, this is some of his best work, and indeed some of the best work being done in contemporary fiction.If you need the status quo definition of Justice and Beauty to get to sleep at night, don't read this book. But if you can't turn away from the dark spectacle of the raw human heart, this is for you.