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Last Exit to Brooklyn is a 1964 novel by American author Hubert Selby Jr. The novel takes a harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s written in spare, stripped-down prose. [1] Critics and fellow writers praised the book on its release.
- Hubert Selby
- 1964
When Calder and Boyars published Last Exit to Brooklyn in the UK, on January 24, 1966, it had already been out for well over a year in the US. Some British critics took the opportunity to grapple with this masterpiece of observation and idiom, but many others let it pass them by.
Last Exit to Brooklyn was banned by British courts in 1967, a decision that was reversed the following year with the help of a number of writers and critics including Anthony Burgess and Frank Kermode.
- (27.9K)
- Paperback
- Selby Became A Writer When He Was Bedridden For Three years.
- Selby’s Prose Has Been Compared to The Improvisational Style of Jazz.
- ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’ Has Been Banned in Many countries.
- Hubert Selby, Jr. Influenced All Your Favorite Musicians.
- The Film Replaced Sunset Park with Red Hook.
According to the documentary “It/ll Be Better Tomorrow,” Hubert Selby, Jr. was born in 1928 in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and was nicknamed “Cubby” because he was the Jr. (cub) to his dad’s Sr. At 15, he dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine, where he contracted tuberculous at sea. His entire tuberculosis ward died except for him, but...
Selby’s manner of writing is very experimental. He does away with quotation marks, which allows the characters to speak as directly with the reader as the author. He often omits spaces between words, too. The paragraph indentations are random and vary from page to page. There’s a section in the book that is completely capitalized because the marrie...
When the book was published, it was an international hit. Selby’s topics and writing style felt wholly new at the time and readers clamored for copies. But his shocking language and subject matter were compared to pornography when it was first released and the book was banned in many countries. Selby’s work was the subject of two obscenity trials, ...
David Bowie claimed “Last Exit to Brooklyn” influenced his life. The Smiths named their first album, “The Queen is Dead” after the story in “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” The book also influenced Sting’s first band, named “Last Exit.” Selby’s work inspired many of Lou Reed’s songs. Henry Rollins was instrumental in rediscovering and popularizing Selby’s ...
In 1989, “Last Exit to Brooklyn” was made into a movie by the German director Uli Edel. Instead of using the short stories, the director combined them all to create one narrative, for a critically acclaimed film starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alexis Arquette. The biggest change in the movie was the swap of the neighborhood setting. Though most o...
Aug 5, 2017 · The aftermath of Last Exit to Brooklyn’s release was an exercise in controversy. It was banned in the United Kingdom until writers such as Anthony Burgess defended it, while back in the United States the book was not a critical darling, with many critics attacking its style and subject matter.
I knew a little bit about this book before I started it; I knew it was briefly banned in Britain in the ‘60s before the ban was reversed after a load of other writers kicked up a fuss, and I knew that Irvine Welsh really liked it (my edition has an Introduction by him).
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Two of his novels, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and Requiem for a Dream (1978), explore worlds in the New York area and were adapted as films, both of which he appeared in. His first novel was prosecuted for obscenity in the United Kingdom and banned in Italy, prompting defences from many leading authors such as Anthony Burgess. He influenced ...
