Shit

It looks like one of my heroes, Harry Crews, has passed away. There nothing in any official sources yet, but that's what The Georgia Review has posted on Facebook.

I've put up a lot of shit about him over the last couple of years, all of which you can find by clicking his name at the bottom of this post. More when we get a proper obit.

I think this quote from Flannery O'Connor from the Harry Crews Online Bibliography sums up a lot of what I find so compelling in his work:

When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs as you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock—to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures.

He's been a huge influence on me, including during the writing of Satan Is Real. To prepare for work, Neil Strauss told me to read classic American literature, to get it in my bones. What I read, twice in a row, was Harry Crews' A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. I read it because it was the best memoir I knew of, by anyone, anywhere. And I'll stand by that.

Also, this.

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