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Summary: words as OUT
Review: This book is reported, screaming from the deepest anexxes of hellish inertia and hate. This books blunt brutal prose grabs a hold of you after you catch the rythm of the various characters.
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Summary: Powerful, Flawless Music in the Minor Key
Review: 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!
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Summary: A great, intense novel
Review: This is an amazingly dark, brutal vision, and some of the most intense writing I've ever encountered. If you're interested in the "darker" side of the American Dream, you must read this book
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Summary: a truly shocking and disturbing book
Review: this is an icredible book that tells in a no holds barred fashion the life are various sordid low lifes living in the brooklyn waterfront. The situations are realistic as is the langusage. When I first saw this book in 1966 and read a smattering of it I immediatley realized that this is exactly the way the characters talk and act. there is nothing out today that has the impact of this book despite the fact that more authors use explicit langugae and more. this book is as powerful today as when it was released in 1964.
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Summary: It helped me go to sleep....
Review: This is the only book of the last fifty or so I have read that I just wanted to give up on. It was a distorted didactical load of the usual religious dogma. Yes, after 3 chapters I climbed out of my stupor to realize that each chapter (7 in all, of course) was unrelated other than that each was a relation of a christian sin to a world we are more familiar with. After that, I was able to entertain myself by seeing how quickly I could guess which sin was next as I started each chapter. I know what this book is "supposed" to represent, however, it is not worth reading unless you enjoy repetition and weak imaginations. My apologies for all the bitterness.
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Summary: Worst Book Ever!
Review: This is the worst book I have ever read.
Half extreme right wing ideology and half hackneyed pornography, this is one real piece of garbage.Now at first I thought the point of the book was to show how bad these people's lives really were. But if you read it through you'll see that it's anti-union, anti-semitic, anti-gay, and anti any number of other things that might offend the reader.
For christ sake there's a story about a gay union activist who ends up becoming a pedophile because he is dumped by his lover... There's an Anti-Semetic story that makes fun of a poor Jewish widow. There's a story about a girl getting gangraped to death. There's a story about some young hooligans (I think poor Greek kids, in any case I am pretty sure they were immigrant) killing a sailor or beating him half to death (can't remember). And these hooligans are basically the heroes of the whole book. Oh yeah then there's another story where these hooligans go and take drugs with some really stereotyped gay people, and they rape one of the "Queens" under the influence of the drugs. Read it and you will realise that it is a shameless piece of propaganda. You won't find a book that pushes ideology any stronger than this. There were a lot of really horrendous books written in the soviet union, praising the communist spirit and so on. This book is exactly the same except it's right wing propaganda. This is often the case with books or movies in the United States, just because a work deals with "hell" people think it's underground or anti-establishment or alternative. The people in this story aren't real people. There are no poor working class americans here. All we see is one prejudiced cliche after another.
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Summary: brilliant and brutal.
Review: this was one book that i couldnt put down. its still disturbing at times <read Strike> but it flows beautifully and is very enjoyable.
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Summary: Worst ... book ... ever!. And that is saying a lot.
Review: This was the worst thing I have ever had the displeasure of slogging through. Not since high school have I ever labored to finish a book like I did with this one. I don't understand the appeal of this style of writing and the seemingly pointLESS "stories" in this book. By the end there are characters just yelling at one another in ALL CAPS for pages and pages. I don't get this book at all. Maybe it's just one of those supposedly *cool* things, like William Burroughs, that I don't get at all. Whatever the case, I don't understand at all why this book is so revered as some sort of 20th century classic. This has put me off Hubert Selby, Jr.. This is the first book of his I ever read and it seems highly unlikely I would read one of his books again.
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Summary: An American Classic!
Review: Very few novels I've ever read can match Last Exit... in terms of raw, visceral impact on the reader. Written and set in the 1950s, this book is still shocking in the 1990s. However, Last Exit has a great deal more to offer than mere shock value. Selby's stories are vivid, sometimes touching, and his characters, though they often behave disgracefully, are real people. Additionally, his writing style, which uses as little punctuation as possible, is well suited the frenetic pace of the novel. Forget all those nauseatingly boring literary atrocities you were forced to read in high school. Last Exit to Brooklyn is a true American classic.
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Summary: Modern Bible stories and on being human.
Review: With a journalistic clarity which has not been seen in the last 50 years or perhaps ever, Selby fictionally documents the lives and life of various natives in post-war Brooklyn. Like Burgess ("A Clockwork Orange") Selby is one of only a few authors who can use the rhythm and energy of pure language, either imagined or otherwise, to ignite the senses and open the mind. Staggering across a desolate landscape, the denizens of each short story are gripped in depravity, violence and any variety of desire/panic that is described in all its painful detail. The impact of which can scarcely be conceived within English words. These gruesome urban yarns are not presented as shock for the sake of itself. At the beginning of each vignette is a quote from the Bible (King James). Perhaps, at the time and within the context of something undeniably pertinent, Selby was re-telling some older stories. To be human in an inhumane world. Behind our excesses, no matter how grotesque or extreme, there is a frailty and tenderness that borderlines the spiritual. These tales caution that the death of spirituality and of dreams in general is a slow and painful one. Never in a flash of self-sacrificial glory but a long and agonizing descent. The personal loss of everything, starting with human dignity. The one hope is that life, in all its imperfect forms and circumstances, crawls, copes, pleads and hangs on through its course. Cold comfort, but a constant throughout. These stories were recommended to me and as I pass on its recommendation to others, its odd that I see the same impact repeated time and again.
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