Last Exit to Brooklynremains undiminished in its awesome power and magnitude as the novel that first showed us the fierce, primal rage seething in America’s cities. Selby brings out the dope addicts, hoodlums, prostitutes, workers, and thieves brawling in the back alleys of Brooklyn. This explosive best-seller has come to be regarded as a classic of modern American writing.
An extraordinary achievement . . . a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside.”The New York Times Book Review
As dramatic and immediate as the click of a switchblade knife.”Los Angeles Times
The raw strength and concentrated power ofLast Exit to Brooklynmake it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities.”Harry T. Moore
Last Exit to Brooklynshould explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.”Allen Ginsberg
Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different personslightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said.”The Nation
Selby has an unerring instinct for honing our collapse into novels as glittering and as cutting as pure, block, jagged glass.”Saturday Review
Scorching, unrelenting, pulsing.”Newsweek
The marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose.” Richard Price, from his My Five Most Essential Books,” published inNewsweek(April 13, 2009)