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 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $9.94
You Save: $16.06 (62%)
New (50) Used (27) Collectible (8) from $9.92
Avg. Customer Rating:  153 reviews
Sales Rank: 1694
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6.1 x 1.6
ISBN: 0374299250
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780374299255
ASIN: 0374299250
Publication Date: March 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
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| Customer Reviews:
 From the tube to the shelf August 5, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A strong connection to TV shows like "Law and Order" and "The Wire" is both the strength and weakness of "Lush Life," a look at the shooting death of a hipster kid on New York's Lower East Side. Richard Price uses his considerable skill with dialogue and description to bring a nasty incident to life and vicerally evoke the streets of a not-quite-gentrified section of Manhattan. But those same skills periodically veer into mimicry of a "true crime" novel or a "Law and Order" episode--I half expected to hear that distinctive "da-dah" sound at the end of each cop chapter. Sadly, perhaps the genre of New York crime fiction has been exhausted for now and novelists should hold off on mining this lode until some of these shows go off the air. When cops themselves start looking to TV for their best lines, it's time to change the channel.
 The Talk On the Street July 26, 2008
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
The master of vernacular and dialogue, Richard Price takes readers street level for a joyride across New York's Lower East Side in his latest novel, LUSH LIFE.
Ike Marcus, an aspiring actor working as a bartender at one of the neighborhood's trendier nightspots, is gunned down outside a friend's apartment building when he flips off one of his would-be muggers by telling him, "not tonight my man." Sometimes last words become famous, and Ike's are soon making headlines and showing up on cheap t-shirts around the country.
A young and handsome Jewish kid from the suburbs, Marcus is the sort of victim who makes instant headlines and overnight street shrines. His white skin, photogenic face, and American Dream background will ensure his murder receives as much front page treatment from the tabloids, as they'll provide cable news networks an opportunity to treat his death as an around-the-clock "developing story." Ike Marcus' death is a bigger worry for the area's gallery owners and local merchants and developers than it is for his killers. The NYPD knows from the jump it's unable to treat this case as just another late night shooting statistic.
Richard Price's stories have a reputation for immersing readers into the chain of events, and LUSH LIFE practically embeds them into the midst of its hectic, time-sensitive police procedural. Dynamic characterization flows throughout a fast-paced storyline, leaving readers with the impression of being involved in the sweeps and canvassing, the mind games and con jobs of the detectives' investigation. LUSH LIFE is likely to cost precious sleep time if you take it with you to bed, and can cause you to miss your stop if you're reading it on the bus or train. "A book you just can't put down" might be a cliché, but it describes Price's novel succinctly.
Despite LUSH LIFE's human drama, and the novel's occupation with personalities and vocabularies, it's neither the cops or suspects, or the victim for that matter, who are the real focus of the story. The heart and soul of this novel is the neighborhood itself.
Once the most densely populated area on the planet, New York's Lower East Side remains a microcosm of the world's disparities in wealth, power and education. Here, high-end boutiques and art galleries sit around the corner from rundown housing projects and dilapidated tenements; a neighborhood where ambitious yuppies, artists and writers, project kids, illegal immigrants, drunks and junkies, and the remnants of a once thriving orthodox Jewish community, are all neighbors. It's also the place of origin for just about everyone in the story; some living there all their lives, while others have been removed by a generation or two but, like Marcus or the character Eric Cash, have returned to the streets their parents and grandparents lived and worked, loved and died. Price's own family roots extend back to the Lower East Side, and the neighborhood's radical mix of races and nationalities, incomes and lifestyles always fascinated him. In many ways LUSH LIFE seems like a tribute to the place.
Since I'd read THE WANDERERS and LADIES' MAN back in the Eighties, I've been a fan of Richard Price. Lately Price was one of the writers for HBO's THE WIRE, a first rate crime drama whose popularity and acclaim were in no small part due to his contributions. "Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced," is how author (and fellow WIRE screenwriter) Dennis Lehane describes the man. I agree. As for this novel's success, it's been reported that Price is now working to turn LUSH LIFE into a movie with producer Scott Rudin, and cable's FX network wants him to adapt the story to a series pilot. I'm looking forward to both.
Other novels by Richard Price:
THE WANDERERS (1974)
BLOODBROTHERS (1976)
LADIES' MAN (1976)
THE BREAKS (1983)
CLOCKERS (1992)
FREEDOMLAND (1998)
SAMARITAN (2003)
A Moving, Exciting Police Story! July 24, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
This is a moving and exciting police story in which a bartender witnesses a shooting of a fellow bartender and becomes shy of the police after they try and finger him for the shooting. Did he really do it? Will he ever tell the police what he knows? Eric Cash is a character who is caught between the up and coming gentrified New York City and the poor New Yorkers who live in the shadows. Once an up an coming actor, can he survive this trauma? Did he commit the crime? Richard Price, an author known for his hard bitten New York crime stories tells this story like a screenplay. He has written for the television show The Wire and is getting an ever better knack at writing dialogue. I enjoyed this book and completed it in two days. Highly recommended.
Hard to put down July 23, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Lush life is a delicious thriller that once you satrt is hard to put down
 Probably enough substance, but way too much style July 18, 2008
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I really struggled to get through this novel, mainly because it was way too much about trying to dazzle me with its author's intellect and not enough about telling a story that I could follow without a brain-ache. This may be the way people talk and think, but I'm not entirely convinced. It didn't connect with me, I didn't identify with the characters, and finally it was not worth the trouble.
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