About The Book

Last Exit to Brooklyn remains 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.

Praise

“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 of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities.” –Harry T. Moore

“Last Exit to Brooklyn should explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.” –Allen Ginsberg

“The marriage of brutal street life and gorgeous bebop prose.” –Richard Price, from his ‘my Five Most Essential Books,” published in Newsweek (April 13, 2009)

“Drops like a sledgehammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different person–slightly 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