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Lush Life (Thorndike Core)
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MSRP: $16.95
Your Price: $11.53
Savings: $ 5.42 ( 32% )
Shipping: Usually ships in 9 to 14 days
Manufacturer: Large Print Distribution
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Additional Lush Life (Thorndike Core) Information
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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 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 project—an 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
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What Customers Say About Lush Life (Thorndike Core):
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sad. Run, do not walk, away from this book. Dark. relationships unrealistic. The only thing I got out of it was an intro to vulgar, impressively varied and vivid street lingo.
That's the way I would describe this baby. Lush life is about a mood; a New York moment captured; crumbling and cast to the side in a few years for a new kind of the same. If you're into atmospheric novels and don't mind the absence of plot ( Claire Messud fans out there). , then you'll like this. Gritty and smooth at the same time, it is an exercise in abstract crime writing. The equivalent of modern art for me; something you cock your head at and say " I don't think I know what this is really, but I kinda like it."
Maybe this book will get made into a movie and more people will like it. There are authors out there who use this similar type of literary device but are more effective because you understand what is going on even if you are not familar with detective speak or street hustler banter.
I had many problems with this book. I have never before read a book full of such lame, hackneyed characters such that you just do not care what happens to them.
I read this book with high expectation because it was highly recommended by a book critic I respect. I understand that the author was trying to portray "real-life" repartees, but this was completely lost on me due to ineffective utilization of police and street jargon.
The characters were not even of those that you like to hate. I was hoping that the author would linger a bit more on the despair and desperation of wanna-be artists, but this was just barely touched upon.
The book reads more like some sort of a screenplay, which does not work in print media. The description of the hum and din of New York and its inhabitants was well done.
I love the double-entendre in this title. It's a novel about solving a crime from a police detective's point of view. Ike's father is so disoriented by the death of this son that he avoids his family and even tries to solve the murder himself. One reviewer noted that the mystery in the novel is resolved in the first third of the book. More exasperating, though, to Matty, is the lack of cooperation on the part of his supervisors. However, what the reviewer called "mystery" struck me as frustrating, so that I was relieved by its early resolution. "Lush" can be taken to describe the classy restaurants and shops of the Upper East Side of NYC, or it can refer to the alcohol and drug abuse that is rampant. The cop is Matty Clark, and the other main character is Eric Cash, a restaurant manager who flees the scene when Ike, one of the guys he's out partying with, is shot on the street.
The author seemed to be sowing the seeds of doubt for the reader, and I thought it made for a rather beguiling beginning actually. In any case, this is not a mystery novel or a thriller. Matty finally begins to examine his own family issues, as his sons are not exactly model citizens. When it becomes clear that their mistakes have been a major hindrance to the totally botched investigation, Matty has to take the blame and overcome the consequences--persuading an indignant witness to provide more clues.
You don't learn anything particularly interesting about the characters or their motivation, it's just "Oh, case closed. And when the crime is finally wrapped up, it's particularly unsatisfying.
At 100 pages I loved it, at 200 pages I was ready for it to end, at 300 pages I was annoyed, and at 400 pages I felt cheated. The excellent writing (and the great reviews) kept me going, hoping he'd pull it out deeper into the book.
I have to agree with a lot of the other voices here - this book is just too long. Tiny tidbits of character development and exploration, but nothing satisfying.
He doesn't. It's pretty much the same characters doing the same things over and over and over.
No twist, no reveal, not even a moment's worth of tension. The end." I'd love to recommend this book for the quality of the writing, but I can't since investing in the first part means having to sit through the rest to see how it turns out.
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