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Review
"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, block, jagged glass."--"Saturday Review"
"Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing."--"Newsweek"
"The marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose
"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, block, jagged glass."--"Saturday Review"
"Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing."--"Newsweek"
"The marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose
Book Description
The first novel to articulate the rage and pain of life in "the other America, " "Last Exit to Brooklyn" is a classic of postwar American writing. Selby's searing portrait of the powerless, the homeless, the dispossessed, is a fiercely and frighteningly apposite today as when it was first published twenty-five years ago.
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First Sentence
THEY sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
THEY sprawled along the counter and on the chairs. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful, Flawless Music in the Minor Key,
By
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!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Affecting,
By
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.
4.0 out of 5 stars
The hidden 50s,
By
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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