Newly Introduced to Richard Price

books:


	• Lush Life: A Novel Richard Price Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 131 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

Going through "Wire" withdrawal?

Price was an award-winning writer for "The Wire," the hit HBO series, and it shows in this fine novel. It's perfect for those of us going through withdrawal after the end of the show; there's even characters that closely mimic McNulty, Kima, and Bunk. As most other reviewers have mentioned, the dialogue is terrific, and Price has an ear for the street dialect. Well done. Great novel.

Liked it!

Paid money for the book. I don't regret my purchase. I liked it.That's all. Be well.

for more information click here

Slow police procedural

Lush Life is about a robbery gone awry, the people involved/affected, and how police go about solving the crime. The story really drags because the author tries to give an all-encompassing view-how the lead detective goes about developing clues and tips, his relationship with his ex-wife and his 2 sons, his attraction to the victim's mother, etc. Then you have the victim's father, how he handles the tragic loss of his son, his relationship with his wife and daughter, his problem with drinking, etc. Then you have Eric Cash, one of the victims, and what he does afterwards, feels about what happened, why he acted the way he did, etc. It all makes for a realistic, but very dull read.

for more information click here

Brilliant

Price is a unique and brilliant writer. Lush Life is an excellent and original novel. Beautifully conceived and executed. It shows the complexity behind any incident in life...in this case, a mugging and murder. Thank you Richard Price for doing the difficult job of creating your art and writing this novel. Well Done!

Newly Introduced to Richard Price - And I'm Impressed

This is my first Richard Price novel. Not as good as I thought, but better than lots of books on the market.
Love his dialog, and his knowledge of the language of the city. He seems totally convincing to me. He knows these people.
Somewhat like a Dostoevsky novel, there's a crime at the center, but the book is about the ripples sent forth from the act.
Police are involved. Reluctant and enthusiastic witnesses. The shooter and his world of abuse. All are highlighted, stirred to some sense of self-worth, self-awareness by a rather random, casual crime.
The shooting means so little to the shooter until he and his friends see the stir it makes in the community. He writes hip-hop style poetry in his notebook that reveals his new sense of power. But the power in his poetry keeps meeting his random, fearful life.
He's the hero of his own made up story. But, he's dogged by the fact that the shooting was not a bold, brazen act, but a flinch, an act of cowardice. He keeps trying to live up to his new self-image without much success.
One of the most memorable scenes in the book shows him with his gun trained on the head of his sleeping step-father, while his mother looks on from another room. She slowly backs out of the room and simply goes to bed. She knows him.
The book loses its momentum when all the plots and subplots start flying about. But, at its core, a deeply engaging book about life lived in too-close proximity - to each other, and to death.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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).

for more information click here

hot