The Five Essential Books for Richard Price

If you haven't yet heard about Richard Price, think in the same time at Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow: you'll get an approximate idea of the Bronx-born novelist and screenwriter. His most recent book is Lush Life. For Michiko Kakutani this book is a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City. That sounds very cool, I haven't read the book and it's a shame. I should order it on the Amazon right now! Clayton Moore simply says that it's a damned good book, and John H. Richardson adds that in Lush Life every sentence is a pleasure.

Richard Price gave in Newsweek his list of five essential books, along with a cool reason for each one. Here you go:

1. Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (the marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose)
2. City of Night by John Rechy (both shocking and suffused with longing, a combo that can make an adolescent boy circa 1966 lose his mind)
3. The Cool World by Warren Miller (the fictional diary of an incarcerated black kid captures a jangled, too-often-muffled voice)
4. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller (a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris)
5. The Essential Lenny Bruce (verbatim transcripts of his routines; I heard him with my eyes; he gave me my voice)

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(meanwhile I ordered Lush Life; I will come back to it in a couple of weeks).



(A Life in Books)