Lush Life - Softcover

Richard Price

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747595445 ISBN 13: 9780747595441

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2008

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).

About this title

Review

Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley

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.  

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0747595445
• ISBN 13: 9780747595441
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 464