Totally Booked
A Feast of Snakes by Harry Crews
[REVIEW]
“A Feast of Snakes” by Harry Crews is searing, hypnotic, disgusting, brutal, visceral, hilarious, and deeply tragic. It’s a book that grabs you like a pitbull and locks its jaw.
Tuesday, February 10, 2026
Obituaries / Harry Crews
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| Henry Craws |
Obituary
Harry Crews obituary
American novelist whose southern gothic tales featured the requisite Bible-thumpers, snake-oil sellers and rednecks
Michael Carlson
Tue 10 Apr 2012
The novelist Harry Crews, who has died aged 76, was part of a tradition of writers from the American south stretching back to Edgar Allan Poe and running through William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. It is sometimes described as gothic, and Crews's books featured the requisite Bible-thumpers, snake-oil sellers and seething rednecks.
Harry Crews / An American Tragicomedy
Harry Crews: An American Tragicomedy
By John L. Williams.
A Preamble
Harry Crews was the last great proponent of the Southern Gothic — possessor of a blazing talent, whether displayed in a dozen fine novels, some outstanding longform journalism or an indelible memoir, A Childhood. This last has just been paid the deserved tribute of reissue as a Penguin Classic. Crews’ star, a decade after his death, is once more in the ascendant.
Harry Crews / “My Malformed Bones”
Harry Crews, 1979 © Mark Morrow. Courtesy the Mark Morrow Photograph Collection, 1977–2010, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries. An exhibition of Morrow’s photographs will be on view beginning in September at the Koger Center for the Arts at the University of South Carolina, in Columbia.
One night in early 1941, when Harry Crews was five years old, his father nearly killed his mother with a twelve-gauge shotgun. Looking back almost four decades later, Crews didn’t find that fact particularly exceptional. This was Bacon County, Georgia, where in those days “it was not unusual for a man to shoot at his wife,” as he wrote in his memoir A Childhood: The Biography of a Place. “It was only unusual if he hit her.” Crews and his older brother heard the shot, which blew the mantelshelf off the fireplace, from their shared bed. The shot—and the silence that followed. They fled on foot, mother and sons, down the dirt road to an uncle’s house, and the next day boarded a Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, Florida. In A Childhood, Crews recalls the details of their escape: the hurriedly packed straw suitcase, his father’s fury and frantic pleading, the sight of him frozen in the doorway under a kerosene lamp. And then, in the darkness of the road, a bizarre vision: “I began to feel myself as a slick, bloodless picture looking up from a page, dressed so that all my flaws whatsoever but particularly my malformed bones were cleverly hidden.”
Monday, February 9, 2026
Harry Crews / “A Childhood” Is One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written
Crews said that writing the book, first published in 1978, almost killed him.Photograph from the Estate of Harry Crews / Courtesy the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia
“A Childhood” Is One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written
Harry Crews’s account of hard labor and hard living in the American South, first published in 1978, animates nostalgia and then annihilates it.
By Casey Cep
28 March 2022
Two weeks after the novelist Harry Crews died, the Times appended a correction to his obituary. The original version had reported that as a child “he fell into a cauldron of scalding water used to slough the skin off slaughtered hogs.” The correction clarified that the scalding water was for sloughing off the hair.
The Hidden Harper Lee
HARPER LEE. PHOTO: MICHAEL BROWN. © MICHAEL BROWN.
The Hidden Harper Lee
At the end of the profile that Harper Lee wrote of Truman Capote when he published In Cold Blood, she speculated that “Kansans will spend the rest of their days at the tantalizing game of discovering Truman.” It was an odd claim; Capote loved publicity so much that even before he died, there was little left to discover about his time in Kansas, or anywhere else. Lee, by contrast, was so elusive that even her mysteries have mysteries: not only what she wrote, but how; not only when she stopped, but why.
T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
T. S. Eliot’s “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees”
By Casey N. Cep
In 1927, Richard de la Mare had an idea for some Christmas cards. Because he was a production director at London’s Faber & Gwyer, his cards were festive poetry pamphlets that could be sent to clients and sold to customers for one shilling a piece. Because two years earlier Geoffrey Faber had lured a banker from Lloyd’s Bank to work as an editor at his publishing house, Faber & Gwyer had T. S. Eliot to contribute to the series.
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Pills by Donald Ray Pollock
Pills
by Donald Ray Pollock
I was hiding out in Frankie Johnson’s car, a canary yellow '69 Super Bee that could shit and get. We were on a spree, stealing anything we could get our hands on—tape players and car batteries, gasoline and beer. It was a day or two after my sixteenth birthday, and I hadn't been home in a week. And even though my old man was telling everyone around Knockemstiff that he hoped I was dead, he kept driving up and down the township roads with his head out the window looking for me like I was one of his lost coonhounds.
Donald Ray Pollock / A Good Man Is Impossible to Find
A Good Man Is Impossible to Find
From the opening sentences of Donald Ray Pollock’s violence-soaked first novel, “The Devil All the Time,” it’s clear that blood will out. The West Virginia and southern Ohio landscapes of this book seem riven by one long, coal-smeared and hell-harrowed gash in the earth, and the stories that vent from it file past in a crimson procession of evils so brutally creative, and so exactingly and lovingly detailed by Pollock, that over the course of the novel it becomes unclear whether they’ve been spawned for the purposes of plot or purely for atavistic pleasure.
Donald Ray Pollock / A Review of Knockenstiff
Donald Ray Pollock: A Review of Knockenstiff
In my research of late into Country noir I came across the name Donald Ray Pollock. Born in 1954 and raised in Knockemstiff, Ohio, Pollock has lived his entire adult life in Chillicothe, Ohio, where he worked at the Mead Paper Mill as a laborer and truck driver until age 50, when he enrolled in the English program at Ohio State University. While there, Doubleday published his debut short story collection, Knockemstiff, and the New York Times regularly posted his election dispatches from southern Ohio throughout the 2008 campaign. The Devil All the Time, his first novel, was published in 2011. His work has appeared in various literary journals, including Epoch, Sou’wester, Granta, Third Coast, River Styx, The Journal, Boulevard, Tin House, and PEN America. His newest book, a novel called The Heavenly Table, was published by Doubleday on July 12th, 2016.1 Find him on his website: http://donaldraypollock.net/
Saturday, February 7, 2026
Donald Ray Pollock / Reading Knockemstiff
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| Donald Ray Pollock |
Reading Knockemstiff
Donald Ray Pollock takes Chapter 16 on a tour of the Ohio mill town where he worked for decades before turning to fiction
August 19, 2011
It seemed unlikely that Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection, Knockemstiff, published in 2008, would cause much fuss in the literary world. Its eighteen stories feature a cast of characters so unseemly and depraved, so lacking in common sense or decency, that the book was sure to sell a few copies to a few weirdoes and be forgotten. But Pollock’s voice is so assured and his vision so precise (and his humor so black) that critics couldn’t help but praise the book as a minor masterpiece.
Donald Ray Pollock / On Finding Fiction Late In Life
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| Donald Ray Pollock |
Donald Ray Pollock
On Finding Fiction Late In Life
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Knockemstiff, Ohio, is a tiny hamlet in southern Ohio. In the 1950s, Knockemstiff had three stores, a bar and a population of about 450 people. Most of those people, says fiction writer Donald Ray Pollock, were "connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another."
Demian Naón interviews writer Donald Ray Pollock
Demian Naón interviews writer Donald Ray Pollock
What was your childhood like in relation to writing?
Of course, as most people know by now, I grew up in a very small community in southern Ohio called Knockemstiff. Most of the people who lived there were poor, and my family was related to many of them. However, my father, who had only an eighth grade education, was lucky enough to have a union job in a paper mill in nearby Chillicothe, and I suppose we were what would now be called lower middle-class. There were no books in our house, but there were magazines, trashy stuff mostly dealing with crime and romance, and so that’s what I started out reading. Many of the characters in my work feel stuck in the place they were born in, and want to escape to somewhere else, which was also one of my dominant desires when I was a kid. But like them, I never did.
Sincerity, rawness, Ohio / Conversation with Donald Ray Pollock
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| Donald Ray Pollock |
Sincerity, rawness,Ohio
Conversation with Donald Ray Pollock
Question: Knockemstiff was a lacerating piece of writing, harsh and gritty, sometimes even nasty and cruel. Its sudden appearance on the literary scene was like a punch in the face that knocked quite a few readers out. The stories leave us with a feeling of emptiness which grows and grows as we keep on reading, partly because we are aware that they are based on real events and real people. Was Knockemstiff an introspective effort to release yourself from the drowsy grip of the city itself, of your hometown?
An Interview with Donald Ray Pollock
AN INTERVIEW WITH DONALD RAY POLLOCK
by Elizabeth Ellen
It takes a lot to get me to read an entire book. I buy, borrow and steal books by the hundreds, but the actual number I read from beginning to end are very few. In the last seven years, I've probably read ten: [this is where I listed the actual ten, but the Hobart editor wisely deleted them saying, "Who really gives a shit what ten books you've read?"]. Most of the time I'd rather read a book I already know and love than take a chance on a new one. I'm the same way with movies. And music. And alcoholic beverages. But I digress.
Friday, February 6, 2026
David Lee
DAVID LEE
David Lee was born in 1990 and is a self-taught artist from Galway, Ireland.He realised his passion for art early on and left university to pursue a career as a full time artist. David moved to Berlin in 2016 and was influenced by a city renowned for its freedom of expression. This influenced his abstract style, allowing him to explore his craft without limitations or boundaries. David’s solo exhibition at AKA in Berlin in April 2018 showcased his exploration of darker abstract themes.
Jonathan Coe / ‘I was a Tory until I read Tony Benn’
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| Jonathan Coe |
| The |
Books
0f my
life
Jonathan Coe: ‘I was a Tory until I read Tony Benn’
The author on getting hooked on Flann O’Brien, reassessing Kingsley Amis, and why his grandfather was outraged by Watership Down
Jonathan Coe
Friday 12 December 2025
My earliest reading memory
Not my earliest reading memory, exactly, but my earliest memory of reading with avid enjoyment: The Three Investigators mysteries, a series of kids’ books about three juvenile detectives operating in far-off California (impossibly glamorous to me at the time) under the benign direction of Alfred Hitchcock, of all people. I devoured the first 12 in the franchise.
My favourite book growing up
Like everybody else growing up in the 1970s, I had a copy of Watership Down by Richard Adams on my bedroom shelves – it was the law. I did love it, though. Whatever fondness I have for the English countryside probably comes from that book. I remember my grandfather – a real country dweller – seeing me reading it and being outraged. “A book about rabbits?” he shouted. “They’re vermin!”
The book that changed me as a teenager
Monty Python’s Flying Circus had given me a taste for comedy that deconstructed the conventions of television itself. It hadn’t occurred to me that a novel could be self-parodic in the same way until I chanced upon a copy of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in the school library. Multiple narratives nested inside each other? A group of aggrieved characters taking revenge on their own narrator? I was hooked.
The writer who changed my mind
When I arrived at Cambridge at the age of 19, just over a year after Margaret Thatcher had become PM, I may not have been a Thatcherite but I was still definitely a Tory. Conversations with new friends helped to change that, but so did the passion and lucidity of Tony Benn’s Arguments for Socialism.
The book that made me want to be a writer
I don’t know what made me want to be a writer, exactly (I started at the age of eight), but I don’t believe it was a book. Years later, one of the novels that showed me the kind of writer I might aspire to be was Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, with its combination of mordant wisecracking and overwhelming melancholy.
The author I came back to
As a student I discovered Pilgrimage by Dorothy Richardson in the four-volume Virago edition and decided she was the British feminist Proust and it was my duty to read her. Boy, it was heavy going. Years later, I realised she doesn’t have to be read in full or in sequence: it can make more sense to take random dips and scoops which mirror the narrator’s own floating, unanchored consciousness.
The book I reread
I’ve lost much of my teenage enthusiasm for Hermann Hesse, but I still occasionally return to his first novel, Peter Camenzind. It’s a lyrical Bildungsroman that combines simplicity (and brevity) with profound moral and intellectual depths, and its evocation of Swiss, German and Italian landscapes is matchless.
The book I could never read again
In my youthful quest for great comic fiction I remember reading and enjoying Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Returning to it in middle age I found the comedy laboured and its hero’s attitudes – once considered a breath of fresh air – felt simply peevish and entitled.
The book I discovered later in life
As a film snob in the 1980s, I looked down on the Merchant Ivory EM Forster adaptations. I now consider them perfect films. And a recent re-viewing of Howards End led me to the novel that turns out – who knew? – to be a masterpiece.
The book I am currently reading
Borrowed Land by Kapka Kassabova (to be published in April). No other writer’s political acuity matches her responsiveness to the natural world, whose despair at the human propensity for greed and corruption is matched by her insistence on the moral necessity for hope. “Nature writing” doesn’t do justice to her range.
My comfort read
I do believe in the concept of comfort reading. Books can and should challenge us, but they don’t all have to do that. In anxious and depressing times, we all need a steaming bath of familiar certainties. For me, it comes in the form of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon: warm celebrations of male friendship which also happen to be (sometimes perfunctory) detective stories.
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