Synopses & Reviews
So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now hes thirty-five years old and hes still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not 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 Erics version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the new” New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray 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).
Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistA 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). "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
"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
"Richard Price has always used setting as a characterfully fleshed out, vibrant, quirkyand in Lush Life, he may have surpassed himself. The scene is the Lower East Side of New York, with its rich history, its socioeconomic diversity, and its recent resurgence as, once again, the hip place to be. The streets pulse, as do the people who populate themfrom the kids in the housing projects to the cops on the beat to the clever entrepreneurs who turn old venues into new ones that cater to those who want to see and be seen. This is novel as palimpsest, with Price limning the environs with resonant traces of what came before. Price's narrative begins with a murder, and as the search for the murderer unfolds, he reveals the pain and frustration in many lives, from the murderer's to the cop's to the families touched by the crime. Though this might bring a nod from seasoned readers of police procedurals, Price's work cannot be pigeonholed into an easy genre. He writes novels, not formula books, and when Detective Matty Clark sits down with a suspect, there is no easy way to categorize either the cop or the alleged perpetrator. Matty is as damaged in his way as is the dead young man's father, Billy Marcus, who can't fathom his son Ike's death. The straightforward and yet ultimately complex message: it's not easy being a man of any age or race in postmillennial America. It seems a little easier to be a woman, though, for in Lush Life the ideal woman may be found in Yolanda Bello, Matty Clark's partner. An unusual siren, her song is her ability to speak in an intimate, nonsexual voice to young men in the housing projects who become immediately confessional or, at the very least, trusting . . . Price has the well-deserved reputation of being the best writer of dialogue in American fiction today . . . His language is so evocative of place and character that he can startle the reader out of any complacency that might tempt assumption about characters. Lush Life is a post-9/11 novel set in a world that once believed in the eternal verities but that now has only the artifacts of those beliefs: Mary the Virgin showing up as condensation on a freezer door in a local deli, a desanctified synagogue being used as a rich man's home, and Detective Matty Clark looking 'south to the financial district, to the absence of the Towers,' It's a world we recognize viscerally, for it's the one we live in."Rita D. Jacobs, Montclair State University, World Literature Today
"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
"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, author of Mystic River
Review
"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, author of The Sweet Hereafter
Review
"This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that we've been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares. Unforgettable." Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan
Review
"Price has been around for what seems like forever, but there's a reason we still read him. Because every sentence is a pleasure. Because he never puts a foot wrong, and never lingers. He takes just enough time to make you care." Esquire
Review
"[A]n acidly funny and hugely successful attempt to get everything that's happening in the city today between two covers....Lush Life covers familiar ground without romancing any of it; it's so vivid and real, it's like Rent as rewritten by Balzac." Commentary Magazine
Review
"It's a big story, but Price isn't much for symphonic flourishes or noisy statements of theme....Like the Jacob Riis photographs Price consistently references, the urban portrait of Lush Life is disarming, but it compels you to look closer." Minneapolis Star Tribune
Review
"[A] story that ripples with tension, marked by jump cuts, parallel narratives and razor-sharp dialogue. Of all the developments in Price's fiction, this may be the most striking: the clarity of the construction, the precision with which his characters interact." Los Angeles Times
Review
"[A] dark and edgy anatomy of a murder and its unraveling....The ultimate literary realist, Price tells a story that, as neatly as a black-and-white photo, shows all the shades of gray in our urban landscapes." USA Today
Review
"...Lush Life remains 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
"So, what do you do?"
Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter... But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not 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 Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. 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).
Synopsis
In Lush Life, Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour.
Synopsis
So, what do you do? Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not 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 Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the new New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray 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).
Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire. A Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistA 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). 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
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 ta
Synopsis
From a great American realist--the author of Clockers and co-writer of The Wire--a riveting story of two urban worlds in collision
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
"So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter...But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he always wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not 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 on Eldridge Street one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. 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).
Synopsis
So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not 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 Eric's version.
In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray 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).
About the Author
Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including
Clockers,
Freedomland, and
Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series
The Wire.
Bobby Cannavale won an Emmy Award for his guest appearance on the hit TV show Will & Grace. His other TV credits include Third Watch, Ally McBeal, Law & Order, Oz, and Six Feet Under.