Last Exit to Brooklyn: Amazon.ca: Hubert Selby: Books

Product Description

New York Times

'Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists...so to understand his work is to understand the anguish of America'

Al Alvarez

'A masterpiece'

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Inside This Book (Learn More)
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First Sentence
THEY sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Read the first page

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Concordance

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

41 Reviews

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

Average Customer Review

4.1 out of 5 stars (41 customer reviews)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, Flawless Music in the Minor Key, Jun 5 2004

By

Anne Rice "Anne Rice" (Little Paradise, California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Last Exit to Brooklyn (Paperback)

This is a work of sheer genius by anyone's standards. Yes, it's raw, it's shocking even to those of us who thought nothing in modern fiction could shock us but it's one brilliantly sustained song of the brutal, the outcast, the desperate, and at times the cruel who exist inside all of us. I read it over and over again hearing it in my head aloud. I lose it for a few years, then grab it up again. The rhythm of the sentences is perfection. It's for all the time, and the movie -- though a different entity altogether -- was pretty damned fine too. Of course it couldn't be the book. No. It couldn't be quite that dark. Yet it had its own magnificently wrought violence. Selby sings! Here's to him from another writer!

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5.0 out of 5 stars Affecting, Dec 28 2003

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K. McNamara (Shreveport, La United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Last Exit to Brooklyn (Paperback)

Enjoyed Selby's prose...Tried to pick up another book after finishing "Brooklyn" and couldn't concentrate. Not for the squeamish or closed-minded. Definitely a re-read down the road.

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4.0 out of 5 stars The hidden 50s, Nov 17 2003

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Rocco Dormarunno (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Last Exit to Brooklyn (Paperback)

I don't know whether it was deliberate or not, but Hubert Selby, Jr.'s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN is a window into the hidden side of America's supposed banner years during the Eisenhower administration. Movies and television of this period depicted squeaky clean families in their squeaky clean houses (with the notable exception of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners whose families lived in apartments). In this Father Knows Best world, no one worried about poverty, minorities, or women's rights, and the only evil was on the other side of the hemisphere in the USSR.

And then there's the world of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. This is the underclass of citizens that the nation preferred to ignore: pimps, hookers, thieves, junkies, drag queens, wife-beaters, and the thousands upon thousands of working class stiffs at the mercy of their union officials or their bosses, neither of which seem to have their best interests in mind. But this is no 'pity the poor' sort of the book, no HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES (although I do wonder what kind of effect this book had upon its release). These characters, and they are fascinating, are not sentimentalized. Selby portrays most of them as brutal, unsympathetic, and as cruel to their own kind as anyone else. Even the drag queens, whom you would think would be a little understanding of each other, turn vicious at their best friends over the slightest insult. While very uneven in terms of pacing and tone, this is still a ferocious book which deserves reading.

Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points.

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Most recent customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Concerns drug addled drag queens in every story
Now matter how the stories in Last Exit to Brooklyn start out, they end up with drag queens on benzadrine. Read more

Published on May 13 2004 by N. Siefers

2.0 out of 5 stars this is not the best thing i/ve ever read i can/t understand
That was my attempt at writing like Hubert Selby, Jr. I don't understand how anyone can write like that. There are NO periods. There are NO commas. Read more