NOVELS BY HUBERT SELBY JR

 
 
 

Few books have aroused so much strong feeling as Last Exit to Brooklyn, with reactions ranging from the highest admiration, through horror, pity and disgust, to the blind fury of those who are opposed to the exposure of social evil. Its merits, challenged first by private and then by public prosecution, have been tested in the courts. Those who have spoken for it, both as an original work of modern fiction and as a true documentary account of life in a section of Brooklyn, leave us without a doubt that it is one of the most important books of the post-war period.

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Requiem For A Dream , now a major film by cult director Darren Aronofsky, is a modern-day fable set in New York. Lonely widow Sara Goldfarb nurtures fantasies about appearing on prime-time television, while her son Harry, with girlfriend Marion and buddy Tyrone C Love, plans his break into big-time drug dealing. Their eyes fixed on an impossible future they move blindly onwards, contorting their lives into coils of self-deception as they struggle to keep their dreams alive.

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Harry White is a man haunted by a satyr's lust and an obsessive need for sin and retribution. The more Harry succeeds - a good marriage, a good corporate job - the more desperate he becomes, as a life of petty crime leads to fraud and murder and, eventually, to apocalyptic violence.

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In his remand cell, a small-time petty criminal surrenders himself to the sadistic fantasies of hatred, rage and despair that are trapped inside him. This terrifying, claustrophobic descent into the isolated mind of a man locked away from society becomes, in Selby's literary tour de force, a challenging vision of a world deprived of love.

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‘...there is a rhythm section there, and there's the lead lines. I love the book for that because it transcends fashion and style. It's not a hip-hop album or anything, but it's a great piece of jazz. It's fantastic.'

Paul Morley, BBC 2 TV Newsnight Review

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Bobby is young and black. He shares a cramped apartment in the south Bronx with his mother, his younger siblings and the ceaselessly scratching rats that infest the walls behind his bed. Barely a teenager, he is old beyond his years. The best thing in Bobby's life is Maria, his Hispanic girlfriend. They are in love, and they have big plans for the summer ahead.

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