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by: Richard Price
List Price: $26.00Amazon.com's Price: $17.16 You Save: $8.84 (34%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299255
ISBN: 0374299250
Label: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Manufacturer: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 464
Publication Date: March 04, 2008
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Release Date: March 04, 2008
Sales Rank: 1116
Studio: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the “new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and “quality of life” squads, from a writer whose “tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
Amazon.com:
Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - As good as you'd expect from Price
Richard Price's writing career has established him as an author who can do it all, from novels to movies to TV, and after a few years of contributing his talents to the dearly departed TV classic The Wire he's returned to the printed word in a big way with Lush Life. Like a great deal of Price's work it has its overly slow spots, but Lush Life still marks a significant step up in quality from Price's last book, the merely good Samaritan, and comes pretty close to the level of the classic Clockers. ... Read More
Rating:  - A brilliant novel of New York City
Often, in my own personal grading system, a novel about crime and punishment that isn't by Dostoevsky, nearly always loses a point for that reason. Whether I bought the book in an airport may or may not, but usually does lose another star. "Lush Life" is not Dostoevsky, but it is a great and humane novel about a crime that is committed at the beginning of the book, is the story of the police investigation into the murder, and is told largely from the point of view of at least one of the characters ... Read More
Rating:  - Vivid depiction of the Lower East Side but lacking momentum
Two detectives work to unravel the story behind a robbery gone bad. The setting--the Lower East Side (of Manhattan)--is as much a character in this police procedural as any human character. Richard Price vividly depicts this neighborhood and believably captures the gritty street dialog used by the detectives and suspected perpetrators. The first third of the book moves quickly, but the pace lags in the middle as the investigation stalls. With the investigation going nowhere, Price delves too deeply into ... Read More
Rating: - From the tube to the shelf
A strong connection to TV shows like "Law and Order" and "The Wire" is both the strength and weakness of "Lush Life," a look at the shooting death of a hipster kid on New York's Lower East Side. Richard Price uses his considerable skill with dialogue and description to bring a nasty incident to life and vicerally evoke the streets of a not-quite-gentrified section of Manhattan. But those same skills periodically veer into mimicry of a "true crime" novel or a "Law and Order" episode--I half expected to hear ... Read More
Rating: - The Talk On the Street
The master of vernacular and dialogue, Richard Price takes readers street level for a joyride across New York's Lower East Side in his latest novel, LUSH LIFE.
Ike Marcus, an aspiring actor working as a bartender at one of the neighborhood's trendier nightspots, is gunned down outside a friend's apartment building when he flips off one of his would-be muggers by telling him, "not tonight my man." Sometimes last words become famous, and Ike's are soon making headlines and showing up on cheap t ... Read More
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