This is the definition of bleak: Selby shows a world fully devoid of empathy, where nothing matters anymore, where what gets you through the day is the only currency that counts. It's not the graphic violence that renders the texts so hard to stomach, it's the coldness, the lack of hope, the impossibility of love. The way the brutality is transferred into language, leading to a kind of secondary orality that helps to evoke the atmosphere of dive bars, backyards, and Brooklyn streets is masterful...

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.

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 t...

Creo que no había leído un libro que me estuviera provocando tanto asco y rechazo como lo estaba haciendo este de Hurbert Selby Jr. Y yo, que soy profundamente rencoroso, pensé en imponerle un castigo ejemplar, darle donde más dolía: le otorgaría una vengativa y solitaria estrella. ✴Y sin embargo, uuuf, era incapaz de dejar de leer. Ahí estaba yo, pegado a sus páginas a pesar de la incomodidad que me suponía no poder saber si únicamente estaba hechizado por lo abyecto de la narración o si algo t...

A Society of LawsThe 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 ev...

The harrowing portraits of men hating women, mothers loathing their 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. de 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...

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 ...

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 reflectio...

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 wr...

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 o...