Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1905546 in Books
• Published on: 1968-10
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From the Inside Flap
The first novel to articulate the rage and pain of life in "the other America," Last Exit to Brooklyn is a classic of postwar American writing. Selby's searing portrait of the powerless, the homeless, the dispossessed, is as fiercely and frighteningly apposite today as it was when it was first published more than thirty-five years ago.

"An extraordinary achievement,...a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside."--The New York Times Book Review

"As dramatic and immediate as the click of a switchblade knife."--Los Angeles Times

"The raw strength and concentrated power of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities."--Harry T. Moore

"Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."--Allen Ginsberg

"Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different person-slightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said."--The Nation

"Selby has an unerring instinct for honing our collapse into novels as glittering and as cutting as pure, black, jagged glass."--Saturday Review

"Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing."--Newsweek

Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn in 1928. Last Exit to Brooklyn, his first novel, was originally published in 1964. He has since written five other novels, The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream, and The Willow Tree, and a collection of short stories, Song of the Silent Snow. Mr. Selby lives in Los Angeles.

Customer Reviews

RAW
This thing is relentless. You think you can't possibly empathize with these people. You can't possibly feel for them. These aren't your 'Titanic' poor; people who don't have any money, but gosh, they truly know how to live life. These aren't those cliche 1-dimensional cut-outs that move like props along an obvious arc. These people are the gutter.

And you start reading and from the beginning you think these people are disgusting and depraved and unredeemable. But as you read on, Selby reveals their humanity and vulnerability. Somehow you start to relate and see how their lives - though so entirely disconnected and different from yours - are driven by the same needs and forces that yours is. To look down upon these people is to trivialize life itself.

Overall, this is a raw, yet very beautiful, glimpse of life. Selby's gift is compassion. This is one of the best things I've ever read.

First Time Hubert Selby Jr. reader here
I can only imagine how shocking this book looked when it was first written. It still appears to be shocking to me now, 50-some years after its creation. Yet, when you take away all the filth, gang rapes and knife fights descriptions, there's little left. That's not to say that there's no talent on display here, its just that its buried under descriptions of filth and degradation. While its not a complete throwaway/garbage, its not a claimed masterpiece either, at least in my opinion.
Still, a lot can forgiven when you know that this was his debut novel. One can only hope that his subsequent works were more focused than "Last Exit".

Entered another time in a place close to home
I had always heard people speak of Selby's, "Last Exit to Brooklyn", yet it was not until recently that I picked it up. This novel takes you to another time, although not another world. The places Selby speaks of are real and the people could be the guy next to you on the subway. Perhaps it is the language used that makes this novel have the ability to transform the world around you. You are taken into the everyday lives of working-class individuals, and are shown a side of people that most of us will never see. A side that people like to keep hidden to themselves, for if anyone knew what they were really like, the consequences could be fatal. It makes you wonder what you do alone, that would scare others. What you hide as a human being, from all the rest of us...