Last Exit To Brooklyn.

SELBY, Jr..

$950.00

Item Number: 51892

New York: The Grove Press , 1964.

First edition of Selby’s first book. Octavo, original half cloth. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page, “To Glenn With All Best Wishes H. Selby Jr 6/22/91.” Fine in a near fine price-clipped dust jacket. Cover design by Roy Kuhlman. An exceptional example.

Hubert Selby’s fiercely controversial first novel, Last Exit to Brooklyn, shocked many at the time with its stark view of a Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood in the 1950s, yet won select critical regard for its “authentic power… Despite its bleakness, the book’s underlying message of redemption through self-destruction caught on in a United States about to enter the radical 1960s… His prose was all Red Hook, spare, direct, as subtle as a punch in the gut from a heavyweight boxer.” Selby, long weakened by years of illness and drug use, nevertheless lived to finally see his novel reach the screen. Directed by Uli Edel and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, the 1990 film was hailed as an “uncommonly evocative screen adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s teeming novel… an epic of the dispossessed” (New York Times).