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"An extraordinary achievement,...a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside."--The New York Times Book Review
"As dramatic and immediate as the click of a switchblade knife."--Los Angeles Times
"The raw strength and concentrated power of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities."--Harry T. Moore
"Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."--Allen Ginsberg
"Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different person-slightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said."--The Nation
"Selby has an unerring instinct for honing our collapse into novels as glittering and as cutting as pure, black, jagged glass."--Saturday Review
"Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing."--Newsweek
Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1928. Last Exit to Brooklyn, his first novel, was originally published in 1964. He has since written five other novels, The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, and The Willow Tree, and a collection of short stories, Song of the Silent Snow. Mr. Selby lives in Los Angeles. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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.