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Lush Life: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Price
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
Buy New: $14.00
You Save: $12.00 (46%)
New (41) Used (29) Collectible (7) from $10.45
Avg. Customer Rating:  146 reviews
Sales Rank: 986
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
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
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).
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| Customer Reviews: Read 141 more reviews...
 A Moving, Exciting Police Story! July 24, 2008
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
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 1 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.
 Catch him. Next time. July 17, 2008
I admire Richard Price -- particularly his dialogue -- but found this very confusing -- and the main character (?) Eric Cash -- less than compelling. Catch him. Next time.
Literature or formula? Don't try for both July 17, 2008
Like many I'd heard of Richard Price but never really read his books, although many told me since I love Dennis Lehane I would definitely enjoy Price. "Lush Life" tells the story of a Manhattan mugging gone even more wrong, and his characters are soon going all over the place as the pieces start to come together.
Price definitely has an ear for dialogue, but the story goes in so many different directions with so many different points of view that I literally said aloud at one point "would you just settle on one or two characters, I'm getting lost!" Like Lehane Price can go on the edge of crude elegance with his prose, which keeps "Lush Life" mostly readable, but the somewhat pat ending is a letdown. I will admit, though, that "Lush Life" intrigued me enough to want to seek out Price's other work. I would imagine those who are already fans of Price would enjoy this book, but it's hard going for a first timer.
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