Synopses & Reviews
A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, it's residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the "other" lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the "new" New York.
Richard Price is the author of several novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. A member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in New York City. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistA PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary AwardWinner of The Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Novel
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A Time Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
A Village Voice Best Book of the Year
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Editors Choice Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the new” New York to show the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour.
When people asked Eric Cash, "So, what do you do?" he used to have a dozen answers. He called himself an artist, an actor, a screenwriter . . . but now Eric is thirty-five years old and still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to bepeople like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldnt say tending bar. He was going placesuntil two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, thats what happened according to Eric.
Lush Life is an x-ray 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). [Prices] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Prices apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.”James Wood, The New Yorker "No matter how routinely and highly praised it may be, Price's ear for dialogue, his ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature. Resorting with miraculous infrequency to the use of dialect spellings and other orthographic tricks, Price gets his characters' words to convey subtle nuances of class, occupation, education, even geographical gradations of neighborhood, while also using them as a powerful vehicle for the transmission, in fits and starts, evasions and doublings back, of their interior lives. He is a perfect magpie for slang, and like its predecessors this novel is rich in fascinating bits of law-enforcement and street-criminal argot . . . By now Price has the police procedural down cold, both in his technical knowledge of the workings of the criminal justice system and in his control over pacing and point of view, and Lush Life reads swiftly . . . His prose has never felt more fluid, his plotting is spry, and later scenes spin by in a monte-dealer whirl before you realize that you have just been had with another unlikely (or perhaps likely but no less dissatisfying) coincidence. But what is most remarkable about Lush Life, finally, is not the astuteness of its social critique. Nor is it the resemblance of the book, or of the experience of reading it, as other critics have claimed, to watching a taut policer or a season of The Wire . . . If Lush Life reads, at times, like a kind of 'Priceland,' offering up to the reader, in a tightly controlled performance, ghostly echoes of the masterpieces that preceded it, perhaps that has less to do with any fault of Price's than of the city that, in ceaselessly remaking itself, in endlessly referring to itself, betrays everyone and everything but the irony and accuracy of those Yiddish words, carved into the blackened beam of the cellar apartment, words that could easily have served as the title of this fine novel: City of Gold."Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books
[Prices] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Prices apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.”James Wood, The New Yorker
The scenes in Lush Life are sure-footed and brisk . . . Lush Life is his funniest book yet, more overtly comedic than any that precede it .. . Lush Life is a satirical but sympathetic take on existence here at what, given the subprime mortgage fiasco and concomitant layoffs on Wall Street, may be the end of the early 21st-century economic boom.”Maud Newton, The Boston Globe
"The visceral pleasures of a whodunit yoked to the more cerebral thrill of a sociology projectan oral history of the modern Lower East Side. Price's commitment to immersive research, and his splinter skill for urban dialogue, allows him to ventriloquize seemingly every sentient being in the neighborhood: dealers, bouncers, real estate barons, illegal Chinese immigrants."Sam Anderson, New York magazine
"Lush Life is complex, nuanced, and full of convincing detail."Stephen Aubrey, Commonweal
"Lush Life revolves around a New York City murder, exploring the crime from all sides. With his trademark urban realism and genius for dialogue, Price vividly takes us inside the world of low-level street thugs, seen-it-all police detectives, heartbroken victims, hesitant witnesses and publicity-hungry politicians. And as Price meticulously follows the murder investigation, readers see that these characters (whether thugs, cops or victims) are far more complicated and interesting than what we had expected. Lush Life is often dark, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and always gripping. Like all of Price's work, it is filled with gritty dialogue that crackles with unspoken tension and hidden meaning."Chuck Leddy, The Writer
"With Lush Life Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century."Russell Banks
"This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that weve been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares."Gary Shteyngart
Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced. Wry, profane, hilarious, and tragic, sometimes in a single line, Lush Life is his masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel this good for a long, long time.”Dennis Lehane
Review
"The method employed by Dostoevsky in Crime and Punishment serves Price's purpose and then some in his wrenching eighth novel....There oughta be a law requiring Richard Price to publish more frequently. Because nobody does it better. Really. No time, no way." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review
"Price's investigation is no mere police procedural, scouring away layers of self-defense in all of his vividly drawn characters. Such is his talent that we care about them all equally....[M]aking the streets safe for the cafe crowd has its hidden cost and no one shows that better than Price." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"No one writes better dialogue than Richard Price....[H]is most powerful and galvanic work yet, a novel that showcases his sympathy and his street cred and all his skills as a novelist and screenwriter..." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"[O]utstanding....[T]his big, powerful novel belongs to all of [the characters], and, like The Wire, its real protagonist is the complicated, tragic, and endlessly fascinating American city street. (Grade: A)" Entertainment Weekly
Review
"Reading Lush Life...is a lot like watching a great movie, with the author as director and cameraman....Price's people talk with the flair and rhythms of real speech...giving his books a soundtrack you hear as much as read." Hartford Courant
Review
"A compelling urban drama....The book, which doesn't lag for even a sentence, is a dialogue-driven, thoroughly riveting examination of how an investigation unfolds and the emotional toll it takes on everyone involved." The Miami Herald
Review
"Lush Life is vivid, authentic, beautiful and rugged....If you don't know Price yet, this book is a great entry. You'll leave the space most authors occupy and move into the realm of masterpiece." Paste Magazine
Review
"[A] vivid study of contemporary urban landscape. Price's knowledge of his Lower East Side locale is positively synoptic, from his take on its tenements, haunted by the ghosts of the Jewish dead and now crammed with poor Asian laborers, to the posh clubs and restaurants, where those inclined can drink 'a bottle of $250 Johnnie Walker Blue Label' or catch 'a midnight puppet porno show.'" Stephen Amidon, The Washington Post Book World (read the entire Washington Post Book World review)
Review
"Lush Life is a good, worthwhile, and in many ways satisfying novel. No matter how routinely and highly praised it may be, Price's ear for dialogue, his ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature." Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books (read the entire New York Review of Books review)
Synopsis
Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, its residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the "other" Lower East Side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the "new" New York.
Synopsis
A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, it's residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the "other" lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the "new" New York.
Synopsis
A National Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Lush Life is a tale of two Lower East Sides: one a high-priced bohemia, the other a home to hardship, it's residents pushed to the edges of their time-honored turf. When a cocky young hipster is shot to death by a street kid from the other lower east side, the crime ripples through every stratum of the city in this brilliant and kaleidiscopic portrait of the new New York.
Richard Price is the author of several novels, including Lush Life, Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He wrote the screenplays for the films Sea of Love, Ransom, and The Color of Money, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. He won the 2007 Edgar Award for Best TV writing as a co-writer for the HBO series The Wire. A member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters, he lives in New York City. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistA PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
Longlisted for the International IMPAC Literary AwardWinner of The Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Novel
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
An Economist Best Book of the Year
A Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
A Time Magazine Top Ten Book of the Year
A Seattle Times Best Book of the Year
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year
A Village Voice Best Book of the Year
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Editors' Choice Best Book of the Year A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the new New York to show the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour.
When people asked Eric Cash, So, what do you do? he used to have a dozen answers. He called himself an artist, an actor, a screenwriter . . . but now Eric is thirty-five years old and still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be--people 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 what happened according to Eric.
Lush Life is an x-ray 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). Price's] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price's apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.--James Wood, The New Yorker No matter how routinely and highly praised it may be, Price's ear for dialogue, his ability to capture and reproduce the rhythm, tone, and evanescent vocabulary of urban life, cannot be overpraised: with all due respect to Elmore Leonard, Price is our best, one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature. Resorting with miraculous infrequency to the use of dialect spellings and other orthographic tricks, Price gets his characters' words to convey subtle nuances of class, occupation, education, even geographical gradations of neighborhood, while also using them as a powerful vehicle for the transmission, in fits and starts, evasions and doublings back, of their interior lives. He is a perfect magpie for slang, and like its predecessors this novel is rich in fascinating bits of law-enforcement and street-criminal argot . . . By now Price has the police procedural down cold, both in his technical knowledge of the workings of the criminal justice system and in his control over pacing and point of view, and Lush Life reads swiftly . . . His prose has never felt more fluid, his plotting is spry, and later scenes spin by in a monte-dealer whirl before you realize that you have just been had with another unlikely (or perhaps likely but no less dissatisfying) coincidence. But what is most remarkable about Lush Life, finally, is not the astuteness of its social critique. Nor is it the resemblance of the book, or of the experience of reading it, as other critics have claimed, to watching a taut policer or a season of The Wire . . . If Lush Life reads, at times, like a kind of 'Priceland, ' offering up to the reader, in a tightly controlled performance, ghostly echoes of the masterpieces that preceded it, perhaps that has less to do with any fault of Price's than of the city that, in ceaselessly remaking itself, in endlessly referring to itself, betrays everyone and everything but the irony and accuracy of those Yiddish words, carved into the blackened beam of the cellar apartment, words that could easily have served as the title of this fine novel: City of Gold.--Michael Chabon, The New York Review of Books
Price's] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price's apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.--James Wood, The New Yorker
The scenes in Lush Life are sure-footed and brisk . . . Lush Life is his funniest book yet, more overtly comedic than any that precede it . . . Lush Life is a satirical but sympathetic take on existence here at what, given the subprime mortgage fiasco and concomitant layoffs on Wall Street, may be the e
Synopsis
An illicit romance at one of America's most esteemed colleges leads to tragedy in Robert Stone's most compelling novel since the bestselling Damascus Gate.
Synopsis
A
New York Times Book Review Editors Choice
“Fast-paced [and] riveting . . . Stone is one of our transcendently great American novelists.” — Madison Smartt Bell
“Brilliant.” — Washington Post
At an elite college in a once-decaying New England city, Steven Brookman has come to a decision. A brilliant but careless professor, he has determined that for the sake of his marriage, and his soul, he must end his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.
Death of the Black-Haired Girl is an irresistible tale of infidelity, accountability, the allure of youth, the promise of absolution, and the notion that madness is everywhere, in plain sight.
“At once unsparing and generous in its vision of humanity, by turns propulsive and poetic, Death of the Black-Haired Girl is wise, brave, and beautifully just.” — Boston Globe
“Unsettling and tightly wrought—and a worthy cautionary tale about capital-C consequences.” — Entertainment Weekly
“A taut, forceful, lacerating novel, full of beautifully crafted language.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
Synopsis
“Robert Stone is a vastly intelligent and entertaining writer, a divinely troubled holy terror ever in pursuit of an absconded God and His purported love. Stones superb work with its gallery of remarkable characters is further enhanced here by his repellently smug professor, Steve Brookman, and the black-haired girls hopelessly grieving father, Eddie Stack." — Joy WilliamsIn an elite college in a once-decaying New England city, Steven Brookman has come to a decision. A brilliant but careless professor, he has determined that for the sake of his marriage, and his soul, he must extract himself from his relationship with Maud Stack, his electrifying student, whose papers are always late and too long yet always incandescent. But Maud is a young woman whose passions are not easily contained or curtailed, and their union will quickly yield tragic and far-reaching consequences.
As in Robert Stones most acclaimed novels, here he conjures a complex moral universe where nothing is black and white, even if the characters—always complicated, always compelling—wish it were. The stakes of Brookman and Mauds relationship prove higher than either one could have anticipated, pitting individuals against one another and against the institutions meant to protect them.
Death of the Black-Haired Girl is a powerful tale of infidelity, accountability, the allure of youth, the promise of absolution, and the notion that madness is everywhere, in plain sight.
About the Author
ROBERT STONE (1937-2015) was the acclaimed author of eight novels and two story collections, including Dog Soldiers, winner of the National Book Award, and Bear and His Daughter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His memoir, Prime Green, was published in 2007.