Body

Harry Crews’s savagely funny and gritty portrait of discipline, obsession, control, and power

Shereel Dupont, formerly the secretary Dorothy Turnipseed, trains rigorously at the behest of her boss turned personal trainer Russell (“Muscle”) Morgan, sculpting her body into taut muscles and bone in preparation for the Ms. Cosmos bodybuilding championship. But the arrival of one family — her family, the Turnipseeds — endangers her chance for victory. The ragtag group disturbs the chiseled competition and leaves Shereel at a crossroads: to whom does her name, and body, belong? Infused with Harry Crews’s trademark dark humor and absurdity, Body is a funny and gritty exploration of how far some will go for physical glory and purpose.

Harry Crews was born in 1935 at the end of a dirt road in Alma, Bacon County, Georgia, a rural community near the Okefenokee Swamp. A protégé of Southern novelist Andrew Lytle, Crews published his first short story in The Sewanee Review in 1962. He published his first novel, The Gospel Singer, in 1968. Its publication earned Crews a new teaching job at the University of Florida and paved the way for the publication of seven more novels over the next eight years, including Naked in Garden Hills (1969); Car (1972); The Hawk Is Dying (1973), which was adapted into a film released in 2006; The Gypsy’s Curse (1974); and the widely acclaimed A Feast of Snakes (1976). Crews’s reputation as a bold and daring new voice in Southern writing grew during this time. In 1978, Crews’s memoir of his youth, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, was published to enduring acclaim. Crews, who died in 2012 at age seventy-six, was a prominent writer in the literary genre known as dirty South or grit lit. He remade Southern Gothic in his own rough-hewn image in eighteen memorable novels, including Karate Is a Thing of the Spirit (1971), The Knockout Artist (1988), and Body (1990), dozens of riveting nonfiction pieces, and one of the finest memoirs in American literature. In 2002, the University of Georgia Libraries inducted Harry Crews into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

MJ Lenderman (foreword) was born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, and is a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. His albums include the critically acclaimed Boat Songs (2022) and breakthrough release Manning Fireworks (2024), named one of the year’s best albums by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Paste, and The New Yorker.