Richard Price: The Grapes of Wrath of Inner-City America

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/arts/television/richard-price-and-cbss-harlem-crime-drama-nyc-22.html?_r=2&ref=arts

Kind of wish Price were developing this for cable, given the short life of Detroit 1-8-7 et al.

In any case, wider thread for the guy and his work.

I was wondering what the hell had happened to this book

For their breadth and depth, his books are called “literary crime fiction.” This suggests a disdain for the genre that Price never expresses. In fact, in its original conception, The Whites was straightforward genre fiction. Under a pen name, Harry Brandt — a nod to his first agent, Carl Brandt, who died two years ago — Price had planned on writing a series of more conventional thrillers.1 This was, he readily admits, largely a financially motivated decision: He was trying to get the prime placement on your preferred airport bookstore’s paperback spin rack.

The first pen name book had been planned for the fall of 2011; it was supposed to be delivered quick, nice, and easy. But his process took over. “You care about the mystery, but there’s so much more going on that’s peripheral to the mystery,” he says. “It just became … sprawling.”

Price’s regular contract is with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but he’d signed the pen name deal with Henry Holt. So as silly as it is, and as much as he’d rather not, he’s obligated to publish The Whites under a pen name. “A thousand times, I’m gonna be asked, ‘Why the pen name?’” he says. “And a thousand times, I’m gonna say, ‘I don’t fucking know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

http://grantland.com/features/richard-price-new-york-the-whites/

sample posted on the book's official website: http://thewhitesbook.com/the-whites-richard-price-harry-brandt-excerpt.html

really excited to check this out.

price included, every member of the moonlighting-novelist portion of the wire's writing staff has had a book drop or is dropping one soon - the newest dennis lehane comes in march i think, and george pelecanos put out a short story collection in january that's pretty solid so far

has anyone else read The Whites? i enjoyed it as much as any other RP book, but there's one curious detail that i can't quite figure out
Milton Ramos is constantly drinking Chartreuse, which is like $60/bottle
why that liqueur? did i miss the part explaining why he only drinks this delicious and prohibitively expensive yellowish-green herbal concoction?

otherwise it's classic RP

there is a similar thread in one of the calls that Graves goes on, where the guy goes bananas trying to sell his olympic medal to buy a bottle of cherry heering because he only gets wasted on sugary liquors but that's all i could find/remember

none of these things are spoilers btw, just minutiae

loved it, def more out and out thriller than clockers or lush life but nothing wrong w/ that

lol i didn't know what chartreuse was i actually thought it was cheap & thats why he drank it, maybe price is expressing his own taste for sweet liquors

yeah it was really quick-moving and tightly plotted in spite of the detailed accounts of various calls Graves went out on (like the olympic medal guy)
i liked it a lot, and as usual he cuts to the bone with some sad truths about the horrific things people do to one another and themselves

great, as always

too short though!

a p good true story from 2008 (staked out w/ cops on the LES) rerun on this past week's This American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/richard-price

he has a new novel!

first in almost a decade?

damn, I can't believe The Whites was 2015

Ooh!!

Lazarus Man, Nov. 12, already seeing some reader reviews and several press quotes
---from publisher's sheet:

in this electrifying novel, Richard Price, the author of Clockers and a writer on The Wire, gives us razor-sharp anatomy of an ever-changing Harlem.

East Harlem, 2008. In an instant, a five-story tenement collapses into a fuming hill of rubble, pancaking the cars parked in front and coating the street with a thick layer of ash. As the city’s rescue services and media outlets respond, the surrounding neighborhood descends into chaos. At day’s end, six bodies are recovered, but many of the other tenants are missing.

In Lazarus Man, Richard Price, one of the greatest chroniclers of life in urban America, creates intertwining portraits of a group of compelling and singular characters whose lives are permanently impacted by the disaster.

"Half a century after launching an astonishing career that includes some of the best crime writing for books and screens, Price has let the mercy in his stories rise to the surface. On the margins, bullets still fly and drugs still flow, but the deadly alleys of Clockers and The Wire give way here to a community just trying to account for its dead and find a way forward . . . For a nation riven and terrified, Lazarus Man is the strangest of urban thrillers: a thoughtful, even peaceful story about stumbling into new life . . . Presented in two long sections with a preface and an afterword, the novel remains in relentless motion." ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post

"Gritty and compassionate . . . [Price] has an ear for streetwise dialogue and an eye for description . . . A chorus of voices enlivens every page in a kind of urban opera." ―Leigh Haber, The Los Angeles Times

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the good news we need thank you

ok i’m in

Great news. Intrigued by Price doing his first non-crime novel since the 80s.