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Last Exit to Brooklyn

Hubert Selby Jr.,

Gilbert Sorrentino (Editor)

3.93 · Rating details · 23,478 ratings · 1,128 reviews

Few novels have caused as much debate as Hubert Selby Jr.'s notorious masterpiece, Last Exit to Brooklyn, and this Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting.

Described by various reviewers as hellish and obscene, Last Exit to Brooklyn tells the stories of New Yorkers who at every turn confront the worst excesses in ...more

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Paperback, 290 pages

Published 2000 by Marion Boyars (first published 1964)

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Jun 23, 2018 BlackOxford rated it it was amazing

Shelves: new-york-city, american

A Society of Laws

The pomposity of the literary establishment in the 1960’s was as bad as it ever has been. I can recall my encounter, as a twenty year old, with Last Exit. But before I bought it, I got a copy of the New York Times review. ‘Another Grove Press porno piece,’ or something roughly equivalent is what I remember. So I ignored the book for the next 50 years. A big mistake, only to be excused by lack of experience. As Sam Goldwyn put it: “Don’t pay any attention to the critics; don’t A Society of Laws

The pomposity of the literary establishment in the 1960’s was as bad as it ever has been. I can recall my encounter, as a twenty year old, with Last Exit. But before I bought it, I got a copy of the New York Times review. ‘Another Grove Press porno piece,’ or something roughly equivalent is what I remember. So I ignored the book for the next 50 years. A big mistake, only to be excused by lack of experience. As Sam Goldwyn put it: “Don’t pay any attention to the critics; don’t even ignore them.”

The fact that the book rates on the filth scale at about the same level as a middling episode of Law & Order SVU, proves just how obsessed with limiting literary experience those who controlled the book trade really were. Narcissistic street boys, casual prostitutes, transsexuals with authentic feelings and thugs were people who couldn’t be taken seriously as people. Nor did their views about what constitutes human relationships, especially the language in which those relationships are described, have any place in literary fiction.

What amazes (and frightens) me is how much nothing has changed in the last half century except for a more general awareness of the under-culture of casual violence and criminality as a way of life. There is of course nothing new in its existence except its increasing publicity. So the world looks like its gone to hell in a hand basket. And the improved visibility of this world is used to justify everything from racism to evangelical revival; from the war on drugs to the war on immigrants. But it is bunk. Selby knew that a substantial portion, often the largest portion, of the ‘civilized world’ lives in uncivilized conditions. And so has it always been, even if the rather more civilized portion ignores it.

Membership in the under-culture is not a choice; it’s an adaptation to reality. The most significant component of that reality is law. It is the law that creates the under-culture of addicts, street sex workers, and petty thieves who mature into not so petty thieves. St. Paul, he whose mission was overthrowing the law, had it right when he quotes the law to his own advantage, “for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” But Paul had one law on his side - Roman citizenship. There is no such loophole for those of the under-culture. The law applied to and in the under-culture is essentially arbitrary oppression by the strong of the less strong. In that situation, survival means knowing your place, sticking to your assigned role, and accepting your lack of relative strength.

The under-culture is a culture of victims who accept their status and act in implicit protest with as much malice as they can get away with. Hopelessness not love is the most powerful emotional force. Love presumes hope; it doesn’t create it. So the law of the under-culture is not the law of the jungle. In the jungle, there are adaptations of speed, size, coloring, and intelligence that give hope and consequently the opportunity for instinctive love. In the under-culture, hope is a lethal trait, a delusion that literally kills.

Despite its grisly content, therefore, Last Exit is a book created out of empathy. Selby knew his characters, and he recognized their dilemma: adapt or die. Since the under-culture doesn’t change much from generation to generation, what he has to say is as important now as it was then. There are many, apparently an increasing number, who share much with Georgette, Shelby’s transvestite sacrificial figure, whose “life didnt revolve, but spun centrifugally, around stimulants, opiates, johns...”

Postscript: A comment by another GR reader provoked a realization by me that Selby had described a process of criminalization of minority groups that is more or less traditional in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more

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Apr 04, 2016 Fabian rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Harrowing portraits of men hating women, mothers loathing children, & the truly devastating absence of love. A phenomenal work of art that's raw, revolting, & insidious. Owes a large debt to the dementedness of M d Sade, though the prose--as stark and jarring, as opaque, as a broken shard of obsidian--is just damn Beautiful.

I can hear from my window some kind of requiem suddenly coming on...

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Oct 18, 2007 Paul Bryant rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Velvet Underground fans

Shelves: novels

This novel was like a car packed with high explosives and driven into the middle of American literature and left there to explode in a fireball of nitroglycerine sentences containing jagged ugly words which could shear your mind in two. I can't believe how powerful it still is, I read it years ago and it seared my thoughts and turned me inside out, and it practically did the same again even though a lot of cruelty and evil violence and scenes of underclass horror have flowed from other writers ...more

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Aug 23, 2018 Barry Pierce rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2018, 20th-century

This book is an assault.
Thematically it’s an assault.
Stylistically it’s an assault.
Emotionally it’s an assault.
So reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and enjoying it, like I very much did, could be akin to a kind of literary Stockholm syndrome.

Less a novel and more a collection of vignettes, Selby Jr.’s first major work is a dark, depressing, visceral, gruff, and scroungy account of the lives of some of the most depraved and tragic characters this side of Shakespeare. Perhaps the most famous book ...more

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Apr 04, 2008 A.K. rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: nausea swim team

Shelves: druuugs

Rare is the book that leaves me so disoriented and raw-nerved. When I finished this I sat slack-jawed for a minute letting my cigarette burn out and trying to fix my mind on something/anything. This is an excruciatingly penetrating vision of the total dregs; a narrative of self-delusion, rough trade, addiction and thanatos thanatos thanatos. Selby, Jr. never seems to slant toward exploitation or pulp and strangely enough, in spite of the godawful hopeless hate-filled suckers that populate his ...more

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Dec 18, 2013 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: america, fiction

Had I read this at the time of release in 1964 it would have seemed like being struck by a lightning bolt from hell where one was made to feel sick, disgusted and appalled by it's graphic depiction of pretty much the worst that human behaviour has to offer. Fast forward to 2015 and nothing has changed, this is a shocking, gut-wrenching read which creates a vision of hell on earth for a bunch of New Yorkers who are just about as far away from the american dream as possible. Selby Jr was a genius ...more

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Mar 19, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it it was amazing

Shelves: novels, merkins

A searing sift through the slurried slums of post-war Brooklyn. The only book that uses shock, violence and vulgarity to depict a world of tragic isolation that truly pierces the heart, gets you so deeply you feel you are THERE, in this boneyard of brittle bones and broken bodies, crying and fighting and fucking and SHOUTING AT YER FREAKIN KIDS TA SHUT THERE TRAPS.

Selby's editor on this book was Gilbert Sorrentino, who helped Selby refine his extraordinarily precise style, his pitch-perfect ...more

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May 25, 2011 Megan rated it it was amazing

Good God, this is a brutal book. The writing style's brilliant, but the stories are so vivid that the pain of the characters is visceral. It's not a novel so much as it's a series of short stories that tie together to portray the hell-hole that was 1950's Brooklyn. There was a whole obscenity case about this book when it was published in the early 1960's: the story that received the most attention for being obscene, however, was not the one I found most painful. The most infamous story was ...more

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Mar 28, 2009 Evan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009-reads, deliciously-nasty, tami-tomes, my-faves, __in-my-collection, labor, transgressive, grove-press, ny-ny, gay-interest-etc

HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!
Grabbed this from my stash Saturday evening and started blazing through it, rapt! Could not put it down. Finished Sunday...

Uncompromising portrait of petty slothfulness and violence in grim Brooklyn in the 1950s. The 1989 Jennifer Jason Leigh film was fine and disturbing, but it can't capture the earnest immediacy of this book and the machine-gun style of expression of the colloquialisms and the stream of consciousness. This is masterly, it seems to have flowed off Selby's ...more

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Jun 22, 2012 Nigeyb rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I have just reread Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) for my book group, having first read it umpteen years ago, and it is still a powerful and disturbing experience, though time has reduced the impact of its graphic tales of drugs, street violence, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism and domestic violence.

As I was rereading I was struck by the parallels with Trainspotting (1993): both in the depiction of street life and the extensive use of an unpunctuated vernacular. What Last Exit to Brooklyn ...more

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Dec 04, 2013 RandomAnthony rated it really liked it

It is wrong that Last Exit to Brooklyn didn't shock me as much with its events as its insight? I don't mean to sound all rough and tough, I grew up in a working class Chicago neighborhood, but I knew people a couple steps removed from Selby's characters. Maybe people feel better when they frame the Last Exit to Brooklyn universe as far away from home, but the novel's power's in the transposition of the darkness to the every day. I mean, there are people feel the same as these characters all ...more

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Dec 25, 2019 Hanneke rated it it was amazing

I hereby announce that this novel has won my lifetime award for unique descriptions of debasement and viciousness. Nevertheless, while being severely repulsed, I did admire the book for its excellent and innovative writing.

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Jan 23, 2010 K.D. Absolutely rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books (Modern Fiction)

Shelves: sex, 501, challenging, race, banned, drugs

My second Selby and I was just as amazed. My first one of him was his 1978-published book, Requiem for a Dream (4 stars also).

Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928-2004) wrote like no other or maybe I have not encountered those "others" yet. I have encountered Saramago's and Garcia Marquez's novels with practically no punctuation marks. Selby's had some but he substituted apostrophes with forward slashes "/". According to Wiki, Selby's reason for this was the symbol's proximity to his typewriter, thus My second Selby and I was just as amazed. My first one of him was his 1978-published book, Requiem for a Dream (4 stars also).

Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928-2004) wrote like no other or maybe I have not encountered those "others" yet. I have encountered Saramago's and Garcia Marquez's novels with practically no punctuation marks. Selby's had some but he substituted apostrophes with forward slashes "/". According to Wiki, Selby's reason for this was the symbol's proximity to his typewriter, thus allowing uninterrupted typing. Selby was a high school dropout and got seriously ill (his lung was operated due to tuberculosis) while in the Marines. Suffering from chronic pulmonary problems for the rest of his life, even without formal training, he began to write reasoning to himself that "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."

And he did and I am not only amazed but also inspired. Who knows? I even have already attended a writing workshop. Selby did not and yet his writing was brilliant. He did not use quotations and was not concerned about grammar. His prose was stripped down, bare and blunt, Wiki says. For me, that's what makes his unorthodox writing simply beautiful.

This book contains the five short stories that were originally published in magazines. The Queen is Dead in 1958 and Tralala in 1961. Both stories, in fact all of the 5 stories in this book, deal with and vivid depiction of homosexuality, drug addition, rapes, pornography and cruelty to ones' own children. This detailed shameless portrayal of post-war Brooklyn in the 50's was the reason why this book was originally banned in Great Britain and Italy in 1967.

My first impression of the book was: shocking. A homosexual being beaten by his lover. A prostitute getting gang-raped. Small toddlers being unattended because the father is a slob and the mother has to work. A closet union shop steward manages the picket in the morning and moonlights as a gay lover frequenting the gay bars at night and dreaming of killing his wife. All these disturbing characters can make a reader drop the book and move to one with positive and uplifting theme (I used to do that, so I know what I am talking about). However, Selby's prose is beautiful and has the ability to make his characters practically leap off the pages of his book. You can't help but be sympathetic to those people whose main problem really is that they are poor.

Hold on though. There is Ada the widow who still washes and irons the pajamas of her long-dead husband and puts them on their marital bed. The woman in the neighborhood talk at her back referring her as "that filthy Jew" and the children mock her. Selby used Ada as the only sympathetic character in this book and it worked like magic because of the contrast and irony that she provided.

One of my unforgettable reads this year.

...more

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May 03, 2009 Izzy rated it it was ok

I read Last Exit to Brooklyn a few years ago, when I actually lived in the titular city and tried to “run” a ~~regular drinking session where my friends and I discussed incest~~ book club. I chose this book for: its reputation, a trusted friend’s personal recommendation, and because Hubert Selby Jr. also wrote Requiem for a Dream (never read, love the movie). Though I generally have a sunny disposition, I also have a penchant for sad songs, movies about addiction, and slutty women. It is a ...more

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Feb 20, 2014 Tegan Boundy rated it it was amazing

seriously? there were actually a couple of times I had to put this down because it was so brutal it was scaring me, it literally made my heart race, but not in a 'spooky' scary, it was in a 'wow this actually is happening somewhere in the world', it has such an air of truth about it that it gave me shivers on multiple occasions. absolutely amazing book.

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Feb 24, 2014 Alex rated it really liked it

Shelves: new-york-literary-biography, rth-lifetime, 2014

Hubert Selby's travelogue brings you deep into an exotic land you've never visited before. I mean, technically Sunset Park in Brooklyn is like ten minutes away on foot, but Brooklyn's come a long way in forty years and I don't know anyone like anyone in this book, which is great for me because there is an awful lot of rape going on.

And the thing is that Selby is such a terrific observer of people, and he has this wonderful sympathy for them, so he gets you inside even the most loathsome of ...more

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Aug 30, 2008 Joshua Nomen-Mutatio rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

An truly unsettling read, as all of the Selby I've read to date has been. Nauseating at some points.

One thing I remember about this book was that the explicit spelling out of gruff, blue collar, New Yawk accents (kind of like the NYC equivalent to the way that Mark Twain captured thick southern accents in Huck Finn, etc) was so grating and constant that I literally was hallucinating (mildly) that everyone around me (in northeast Illinois) was speaking with these accents after setting down the ...more

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Sep 15, 2009 Nate D rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Irvine Welsh readers

Recommended to Nate D by: Maya, indirrectly by leaving it in the living room

Shelves: read-in-2009, 60s-re-de-construction

I'd previously thought that recent authors chronicling amoral and desperate lives in blunt direct terms (say, Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh) owed a lot to Bukowski in particular. But Last Exit to Brooklyn both predates Bukowski's first novel and points most directly ahead to the likes of Trainspotting. Except this is more obliteratingly bitter, more deathly demoralizing. Selby's vision is positively apocalyptic, but only in the most frighteningly believable terms.

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Feb 23, 2018 Mosquitha rated it it was amazing

This book turned me into a transparent, impalpable entity and sent me back in time to the harsh, ruthless but incredibly alive quarter of Brooklyn in the 1950's; letting me observe a number of local souls going about their daily life, struggling to survive, trying to grasp pleasure and avoid pain whenever they can, dealing with their internal demons while the world around them continues its eternal assault. There is no pity, no forgiveness, no respect to be expected where weakness is shown, ...more

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Aug 04, 2008 Beregond 3019 rated it it was amazing

Shelves: forever-favorites

One of the best books I have ever read, hands down. I discovered it at a time where I was aching to find the style that best suited me as a reader, the genre above all others that roped me in and never let go. Selby helped me find it.

After reading the inside of the box for the film, "Requiem for a Dream", I was compelled to find this book that Darren Aronofsky, the director, adored so much. He was from Brooklyn, and the Brooklyn that is described here, so it certainly has much more meaning for One of the best books I have ever read, hands down. I discovered it at a time where I was aching to find the style that best suited me as a reader, the genre above all others that roped me in and never let go. Selby helped me find it.

After reading the inside of the box for the film, "Requiem for a Dream", I was compelled to find this book that Darren Aronofsky, the director, adored so much. He was from Brooklyn, and the Brooklyn that is described here, so it certainly has much more meaning for him. But after opening it and reading the first sentence, just as with Aronofsky, I was attached at the hip to this book, and have since read it many times over again, although only at times when my stomach and my faith in humanity are sufficiently reinforced enough to handle it.

Wholly depressing almost in its entirety, and yet somehow keenly fascinating, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a forage deep into a dark and ugly world, one where the light of the American dream has never pierced even one tiny ray of its brilliance upon the people within. The characters range from the greedy to the angry to the confused to the misguided to the utterly without hope. Almost all those with a good heart that appear fall victim to the protagonists' everyday stompings on morality.

However, don't be mistaken and think that the novel is without depth. Selby guides those special characters in the story, the ones you never thought you could care about, into your heart, quietly and covertly. He pulls the rug out from underneath you at the most unlikely possible moment, and instead of contempt, you suddenly feel pity, grief, despair, and on occasion (on a very basic level), empathy and understanding.

After more ravaging of your psyche then most minds can handle, just when you are beginning to wonder, "How could human beings end up like this?", one of the novel's most powerful images comes forth. The final section of the multi-layered work (full of characters that rarely intersect) depicts a housing project in Brooklyn, no doubt quite similar to the ones in which the main characters all grew up. Selby writes of children in the opening paragraph, frolicking among the betrodden edifices, pretending to kill each other with guns.

There is something so powerful and potent about the hard-hitting, brutal, grisly, painfully painfully REAL way that Selby writes. It is something that is certainly not for everyone to experience, but something that no one should dare ignore. The review on the back of my copy calls it "a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside." I'd say that pretty much hits it right on the head.

Not a read for children, adolescents, or even squeamish or sensitive adults. ...more

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Jan 26, 2009 Vincent Kaprat rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

There are two books that every wholesome American boy and girl should read: The Grapes of Wrath and The Last Exit to Brooklyn. This is quintessential Americana mixed with broken hearts and broken teeth.

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Jul 19, 2015 Alison rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book is brutal, but fantastic!! There are no likeable characters here, but you can't help but feel sorry for the desperate situations they are in at times. A portrayal of the nastiest, lowest forms of character amongst us. A much cruder version of the human conditions that Emile Zola wrote about almost a century previous to this.

I'm wondering why I've not read this before now. Looking forward to reading more of his work.

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May 30, 2017 Ashish rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: purchased

My first book by Shelby Jr. And definitely not the last. I need to read Requiem for a dream by him after this, as it is one of my favourite movies and I have come to love his style of writing. This book provides ample glimpse of the obsessive and the Underground that is prominently featured in Requiem for a dream.

The book is structured into parts that are introduced with a verse from the Bible and the contents are anything but moral; in a way they are, as it showcases the frailty of mortality ...more

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Oct 20, 2010 Jake rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novel

I grew up in Brooklyn, and I live here now- so people are sometimes impressed by the length of my tenure and my selection of "back in the early 1980s" stories. At least until they realize that I'm from Park Slope, which is like being from the Upper West Side of Manhattan- sure, it probably had its rough spots, but no one is ever going to give you credit for surviving the rough streets of Riverside Drive. This is particularly true when you run into someone else who grew up in Brooklyn, and play I grew up in Brooklyn, and I live here now- so people are sometimes impressed by the length of my tenure and my selection of "back in the early 1980s" stories. At least until they realize that I'm from Park Slope, which is like being from the Upper West Side of Manhattan- sure, it probably had its rough spots, but no one is ever going to give you credit for surviving the rough streets of Riverside Drive. This is particularly true when you run into someone else who grew up in Brooklyn, and play the "so what neighborhood are you from" game. In terms of hard-core-ness, pretty much every neighborhood beats Park Slope- except maybe Brooklyn Heights. Neighborhoods that do particularly well in this game include Sunset Park, Bensonhurst, East New York, the attractively named Gravesend, and Bushwick.

"Last Exit to Brooklyn" is a good illustration of why these neighborhoods win. It's primarily set at the edge of Sunset Park, by the Army Terminal, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and also in the Red Hook Houses. At first I was reminded of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, which also concerns the lives of the the lower class, but unlike Graham Greene, Selby doesn't show much empathy toward his characters, or bother to give them any redeeming qualities. That allows him to create a hell of sickening intensity- all trannies turning rough trade, street hustlers gang raping whores, and parents in the Projects neglecting their kids while practicing alcoholism and unsafe sex.

He is particularly acute on issues of sex, race, and class. The most searing story in the collection is "The Strike", which concerns an incredibly pathetic union organizer using strike funds to pay for his adventures with gay men. As in all the other stories, there is no hero: the protagonist is a wife-beater, a thief, and ultimately a child-rapist- and the other people he mixes with aren't much better. Which is to say that this isn't exactly an easy read, and it's made even harder by Selby's eccentric spelling and grammar. It's the kind of book that leaves you feeling kind of messed up and gives you bad dreams, but which seems important if you want to understand how the world (or Brooklyn) really works. ...more

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Dec 17, 2014 Annie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: let-s-get-high

Easily one of the most scarring books I've ever had the fortune (yes, you read that right) to read. This book is like a brief trip to hell. It's full of the absolute worst humans imaginable- cruel, brutish, stupid, common, empty meat-suits- and yet you get no pleasure from their screams. In fact, their lack of humanity makes their horrifying lives even worse, because they don't even seem to know how appalling their circumstances are. This book combines the drawn-out frustration of Kafka's Castle Easily one of the most scarring books I've ever had the fortune (yes, you read that right) to read. This book is like a brief trip to hell. It's full of the absolute worst humans imaginable- cruel, brutish, stupid, common, empty meat-suits- and yet you get no pleasure from their screams. In fact, their lack of humanity makes their horrifying lives even worse, because they don't even seem to know how appalling their circumstances are. This book combines the drawn-out frustration of Kafka's Castle with the senseless violence of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, except twice as gruesome.

Halfway through the book, I'm thinking "Why am I reading this? Why don't I just put it down?" But I really hate giving up on books halfway through- so many books redeem themselves entirely in the last few pages- so I powered through, hoping this was one such book.

It was not.

Relieved to have finished this book which had made my own life look bleaker somehow (Selby is gifted at this), I put it away and pick up a rather less soul-sucking book. But I found myself thinking about this book still, because it was still really bothering me- like having my heart rubbed on a cheese grater, seriously. And about a week later, an idea occurred to me.

What if Selby wrote this book not because he's a pervert who enjoys writing pretty language around nauseating sadism, not because he's some heartless creep... but because he *isn't*, and neither are we? What if he wrote this at a time in his life when he was feeling numb to his own humanity, and wrote this to provoke a reaction in himself? To create this scene utterly devoid of humanity, in order to remind himself of his own humanity, that he could still have these heart-rending reactions to human suffering, even if those humans were despicable themselves? What if he wrote it to remind us that we can still feel, still react with empathy for suffering and recoil from things worthy of disgust?

With that in mind, I rethought the entire book, and what had been a harrowing trial to read became something of a heartening psychological journey for me. ...more

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Apr 17, 2012 Chris rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012-reads

I can picture this book being read in college literature classes. I am sure that it deserves its place in modern American Literature and I am also sure that this book and Selby have their fans. I won't dispute his genius. My rating is not based on the "merit" of the book, but on whether I liked it and the truth is that I found this book to be repulsive and nauseating. I think that I was expecting it to be sort of like Kennedy's Iron Weed (which I liked) but much darker but Last Exit isn't ...more

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Aug 14, 2013 Jason rated it did not like it

Shelves: not-worth-finishing, odd, 2013, ebook, fiction

The high ratings and high praise for this book put me in mind of the following scenario: a group of people stand around a display at a gallery - simply, a pile of shit upon a table. The idiots surrounding the table do not dare to let the others know their hidden truth: they don't (don/t) get it, it looks like shit to them! No one wants to be the first and possibly look the fool, so they begin to ascribe to it those catch-phrase buzzwords they've heard others use in similar situations. Brutal! ...more

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Dec 28, 2019 Ray rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Well how do I review this one.

An interesting read, it comprises a series of vignettes showing low life in 50s/60s New York. Some of the stories are linked in that they feature the same characters, or are set in the same bars and flop houses. Lady boys, pimps, whores and hustlers are prominent characters, marinading in alcohol and drugs, with lots of violence, sex and violent sex. I can understand why HMG tried to ban it in the swinging sixties.

My favourite story has a hard man union chappie ...more

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Aug 22, 2011 bobbygw rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: literary classics, 20th century fiction, American existentialism

Shelves: re-read, literary-classics, fiction

Controversy has always surrounded Selby, Jr.'s writing. From the start, with Last Exit (being his first novel), his original UK publisher Calder and Boyers faced government prosecution in 1967, under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. It was a major trial, especially as it was originally found guilty of being `obscene', and because, more importantly, the Appeal in 1968 overturned that decision and paved the way for a much more open-minded interpretation of literature as to merit.

In some Controversy has always surrounded Selby, Jr.'s writing. From the start, with Last Exit (being his first novel), his original UK publisher Calder and Boyers faced government prosecution in 1967, under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. It was a major trial, especially as it was originally found guilty of being `obscene', and because, more importantly, the Appeal in 1968 overturned that decision and paved the way for a much more open-minded interpretation of literature as to merit.

In some interviews, and in one introduction to the novel that he wrote, Selby himself said that when he was writing this novel (six years in the making), he `was only aware of the rage and anger within' (quoted from the QPB edition in 1994). He also acknowledged that, while he has no favourite among his novels, he singles out The Room, and then this novel, notably, because through it he `truly did learn how to write' (quote from same edition).

Set in New York in the late 1950s, the story grabs you from the start, conveying an incredibly raw, visceral, yet always disturbingly poetic quality throughout. It is superb for its genuine grittiness, horribly grim reality and ugliness of modern inner city life - of thought, attitude, action and feeling - both projected outwards, as well as internalised, all of which is captured through numerous voices of the dispossessed, alienated, disenfranchised. Selby is in the tradition of naturalist/realist fiction, but he goes a significant step further, in that, often through his first-person character narratives/viewpoints, he achieves an hallucinatory quality whose intensity strengthens the realities he conveys.

One noteworthy critic, James R. Giles, in his excellent study of Selby's works, Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr., wrote `It is true that, while all the characters in the novel are victimized by a brutal environment, they are guilty of moral failures that make their victimization complete and irrevocable', and this is done by Selby's exploring without fear or judgement powerful themes that resonant as much today as they did on first publication in 1964 in the US: drug addiction, misogyny, violence of rape and beatings, prostitution, the relentless drudgery and alienation of most jobs as well as unemployment, without value or meaning and life in general that is suffused with hate and a distressingly dark, twisted humour (when not expressed through seething resentment or explosive anger).

I reckon, Dante would have regarded Last Exit as a worthy match to his own vision of Hell - especially through characters who represent the sick underbelly of the city: self-deluding, beaten-up prostitutes, incredibly violent youths and gangs, a desperately lonely, elderly woman who has no life other than pathetic memories of her dead husband and son, among others. As for disturbing, truly dark humour, one such example will give you a powerful sense of it: at one point, two women sitting chatting on a bench in a miserable New York housing project, joke about and look forward with sick, twisted glee to the prospect of a baby - crawling on an upper-storey tenement window-ledge - falling to its death: they're disappointed that it is saved in the nick of time).

In particular, the lives of a handful of individuals are portrayed with great psychological depth, narrated most often from the first-person viewpoint, in a stream-of-consciousness fashion that remains clear, coherent and compelling. These viewpoints capture their desperation, self-loathing, hatred and confusion about themselves and their environments: defiant yet self-deluding Georgette, a hip drag queen who is pathetically in love with Vinnie and convinced she can change him for the better and that he will truly love her; while he himself is a psychopathic and sociopathic gang leader interested in only in sadistic and often instant gratification; Tralala, a violently angry, predatory prostitute who ultimately is destroyed in the most horrifying way imaginable; Harry - interestingly, that name is ubiquitous among male characters in Selby's fiction, acting as a synonym for the type of man who is misogynistic, dispossessed, angry, self-loathing, and self-deluding - who is a trade union leader, loathsome, selfish, arrogant and boring, who is despised or at best tolerated by his co-workers - and, worse, whose misogyny is so genuinely convincing and disturbing, which we hear, being `inside his head', listening trapped to his banal voice, desperation, loathing and perspective, such that it makes Bateman's misogyny in American Psycho appear not only over the top, but utterly unreal (and never mind Ellis' darkly satirical intentions).

Selby has been described by the literature academic and critic, Josephine Hendin, as a `clinician of violence ... whose novels have the immediacy of art' Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction Since 1945, which I think is true; likewise, he is a literary master of demonstrating through his characters a moral ugliness, misogyny and existential despair, and whose power as a novelist is unmatched and unprecedented in fiction (Sartre's famous Nausea (Penguin Modern Classics), for example, is a happy walk in the park compared to Selby's vision).

He is a truly remarkable writer, and, while he wrote six novels in his lifetime, I believe the most powerful and compelling (while not the darkest), remains Last Exit. I cannot recommend it highly enough - it is a genuine work of art, but its power is dark and troubling, so I would likewise strongly recommend you stay clear of this novel if you find yourself in a depressed frame of mind... ...more

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Mar 12, 2014 Jason rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2014, top-10-fav-books

Wow what a stunning book this is, certainly makes it into my top 10.

Brutally violent and amazingly moving this is a book that will have you rooting for the bad guy. The style of writing, no quotations, little grammar and words melting together was confusing for a few pages but once you get the hang of it there is no confusion, it makes me wonder why anybody ever uses "he said, she said". I only had one issue and that was TAKRIST, took me a while to realise KRIST was CHRIST.

The ending of Tralala ...more

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About Hubert Selby Jr.

Hubert Selby Jr.

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Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in Brooklyn and went to sea as a merchant marine while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living, he came to a realization that would change the course of literature: "I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." ...more

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“high spirits and overflowing joy making the absence of love known.” — 31 likes

“The bodies went back in the doors and bars and the heads in the windows. The cops drove away and Freddy and the guys went back into the Greeks and the street was quiet, just the sound of a tug and an occasional car; and even the blood couldn't be seen from a few feet away.” — 31 likes

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