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Last Exit to Brooklyn Hubert Selby 8601406505513 Books

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Last Exit to Brooklyn Hubert Selby 8601406505513 Books

"Last Exit" is now around 60 years old. It's a inter-related group of short stories dealing with the "underclass" of 1950s Brooklyn, New York. It clearly stands the test of time and, to use a hackneyed term, it's a "classic" in the tradition of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg and other more famous authors of the era.

"Exit" divides into three inter-related parts. Part 1 deals with a group of neighborhood toughs, all unemployed, bored and both by habit and temperment, looking for trouble. They hang out at a local dive, a diner called, "the Greeks" (no punctuation, per the author). They avail themselves of the first opportunity for violence and seriously beat a soldier who, in their perception, slighted a local "floozy". After administering a serious beating and in true sociopathic fashion, Vinnie and friends cavalierly return to the diner and their coffee. During the course of the evening and later on, they consume prodigious quantities of gin, benzedrine (legal at the time) and weed. They berate gays but happily and unabashedly party with transvestites. In Part 2, "Strike" focus shifts to a local machine shop and the union shop steward, Harry, who has some problems of his own. He's a lazy, belligerent and foul-mouthed bum whose "work ethic" leaves something to be desired from the perspective of the union (where his fealty outweighs his shortcomings), from the machinists themselves (where his grating and affected "hail fellow, well met" approach and incessant bragging further compromise his strong-arm techniques) to the company executives who provoke a strike in an effort to rid themselves of an offensive parasite. As the strike progresses, the thugs from Part 1 leach food and alcohol from the shop steward, introduce him to the demi-monde of gay sex and eventually beat him to a bloody pulp after he attempts to seduce a neighborhood boy. Part 3 ("Landsend") is a series of vignettes featuring residents of "the Project". This section is the strongest of the three, as it perfectly captures the mood, language, mores and attitudes of a cross-section of lower-class America, both then and now. It is reminiscent in it's fealty to language and atmosphere of Roth's, "Call it Sleep", an acknowledged masterpiece set in turn-of-the (20th)-century Jewish tenement culture. Marlon Brando in the film, "On the Waterfront" also comes to mind.

It's likely that Hubert Selby, Jr.'s perspectives were well informed by his own lifestyle which blended heroin, alcohol and a singularly avant guarde/bohemian lifestyle, especially for the time. His novels were all successful ("Exit" was filmed). Due to the startlingly explicit depictions of both homosexual and heterosexual sex, parts of which were (and remain) disquieting (e.g., the gang rape concluding Part 1), "Exit" was banned as "obscene". By current standards, it remains graphic and probably (given emerging Victorian sensibilities wrapped in sharp, cool clothes and covered with currently fashionable jargon) would warrant a "trigger warning" at certain American colleges and universities. One wonders if Selby could land a university job in the present era (he served as USC writing faculty).

"Exit" is a strong, compelling, unaffected, authentic and vibrant piece of literature. It's clear depictions of 1950s Brooklyn, coupled with the frenetic writing style (idiosyncratic punctuation, reproduced in this edition, reflecting Selby's rush to convey his typewritten thoughts to paper as rapidly as possible). It's more honest than Kerouac, less contrived than Burroughs and as insightful as Bowles. What more can you ask?


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Last Exit to Brooklyn Hubert Selby 8601406505513 Books Reviews

This is dark and brooding writing at it's best. Everyone seems to smolder either with rage or passion or desire. We get a look into a time period, that despite the sugar coating we got as kids from the Hollywood movies, was just as riddled with so many of the issues we deal with today, but most of them were kept locked into narrowly defined areas and neighborhoods, from gay men and the not so straight men that prey on them to the junkies and criminals and psychotics that fill the tenements and bars. If you like Gene Genet or the darker writings of some of the beats, you'll love this.
This book gets the award for the best description of a nose-picking in the history of literature. Great read, tore through it in a day and a half. Unremittingly bleak. I wouldn't read it twice but glad I read it once. My one criticism is that while selby excels at describing low lifes, scumbags whores, losers, felons and psychopaths, he's less adept--or at least less willing--to portray middle- and upper middle-class characters. s a result, the book feels a little one note-ish, a little flat--a tasty pancake with nothing on it. as a contrast i'm thinking of dickens, or dostoevski, or tom wolfe who can write persuasively about anyone regardless of his/her socio-economic status.
This collection of loosely related stories by Hubert Selby Jr. is both brutal and electric. I chose it for my yearly banned books week read and it did not disappoint. Selby’s prose crackles off the page, turning the often shocking and grim life on the mean streets of New York in the 1950’s and 60’s into engrossing and utterly compulsive reading.

I kept having to remind myself that this book was originally published in 1964. As explosive as it comes across today, I can’t imagine what reaction must’ve been like when it first came out. For all it’s grittiness, however, what really makes Last Exit to Brooklyn shine are the occasional heartbreaking rays of humanity that unexpectedly slice in through the darkness however briefly, like gleaming and newly sharpened knives.
Selby's 1964 debut novel is still as gripping and relevant some 50+ years since its publication. It's a brutal, uncompromising close-up of the lives of the disenfranchised, the desperate people society would rather ignore. Last Exit to Brooklyn is a harrowing read, the ultimate in gritty realism, and although it might seem a bit gratuitous in its detailed descriptions of the characters' daily habits and activities, it's also darkly comic, especially in the final chapters. We cannot turn away from these characters; the desperation of their circumstances and the personal demons with which they struggle demands our attention and empathy as their fellow human beings. Selby's unflinching realism is reminiscent of late 19th / early 20th century literary experimentation, in particular, the so-called Naturalism as embodied in the novels of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and France's Emile Zola, perhaps the granddaddy of the movement. Highly recommended.
I've had this book on my shelf for years. And to be honest I had trouble reading it beyond the first chapter. I had thought to myself "OKAY, I can't handle this," and I had to put the book down. And that is the genius of this author.

While I did ultimately get through the book, this is important literature. In my opinion The best literature makes you "feel". While nearly 40 years old, reading every "stream-of-conscience" line is an incredible achievement on behalf on the late Hubert Selby. It's somehow cathartic, and makes you appreciate what you have... while hopefully developing a new appreciation for those very real characters with whom we relate somehow.
"Last Exit" is now around 60 years old. It's a inter-related group of short stories dealing with the "underclass" of 1950s Brooklyn, New York. It clearly stands the test of time and, to use a hackneyed term, it's a "classic" in the tradition of Burroughs, Bukowski, Ginsberg and other more famous authors of the era.

"Exit" divides into three inter-related parts. Part 1 deals with a group of neighborhood toughs, all unemployed, bored and both by habit and temperment, looking for trouble. They hang out at a local dive, a diner called, "the Greeks" (no punctuation, per the author). They avail themselves of the first opportunity for violence and seriously beat a soldier who, in their perception, slighted a local "floozy". After administering a serious beating and in true sociopathic fashion, Vinnie and friends cavalierly return to the diner and their coffee. During the course of the evening and later on, they consume prodigious quantities of gin, benzedrine (legal at the time) and weed. They berate gays but happily and unabashedly party with transvestites. In Part 2, "Strike" focus shifts to a local machine shop and the union shop steward, Harry, who has some problems of his own. He's a lazy, belligerent and foul-mouthed bum whose "work ethic" leaves something to be desired from the perspective of the union (where his fealty outweighs his shortcomings), from the machinists themselves (where his grating and affected "hail fellow, well met" approach and incessant bragging further compromise his strong-arm techniques) to the company executives who provoke a strike in an effort to rid themselves of an offensive parasite. As the strike progresses, the thugs from Part 1 leach food and alcohol from the shop steward, introduce him to the demi-monde of gay sex and eventually beat him to a bloody pulp after he attempts to seduce a neighborhood boy. Part 3 ("Landsend") is a series of vignettes featuring residents of "the Project". This section is the strongest of the three, as it perfectly captures the mood, language, mores and attitudes of a cross-section of lower-class America, both then and now. It is reminiscent in it's fealty to language and atmosphere of Roth's, "Call it Sleep", an acknowledged masterpiece set in turn-of-the (20th)-century Jewish tenement culture. Marlon Brando in the film, "On the Waterfront" also comes to mind.

It's likely that Hubert Selby, Jr.'s perspectives were well informed by his own lifestyle which blended heroin, alcohol and a singularly avant guarde/bohemian lifestyle, especially for the time. His novels were all successful ("Exit" was filmed). Due to the startlingly explicit depictions of both homosexual and heterosexual sex, parts of which were (and remain) disquieting (e.g., the gang rape concluding Part 1), "Exit" was banned as "obscene". By current standards, it remains graphic and probably (given emerging Victorian sensibilities wrapped in sharp, cool clothes and covered with currently fashionable jargon) would warrant a "trigger warning" at certain American colleges and universities. One wonders if Selby could land a university job in the present era (he served as USC writing faculty).

"Exit" is a strong, compelling, unaffected, authentic and vibrant piece of literature. It's clear depictions of 1950s Brooklyn, coupled with the frenetic writing style (idiosyncratic punctuation, reproduced in this edition, reflecting Selby's rush to convey his typewritten thoughts to paper as rapidly as possible). It's more honest than Kerouac, less contrived than Burroughs and as insightful as Bowles. What more can you ask?