{"id":81,"date":"2008-03-02T11:47:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-02T18:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=81"},"modified":"2008-03-02T11:49:46","modified_gmt":"2008-03-02T18:49:46","slug":"richard-prices-new-lush-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2008\/03\/02\/richard-prices-new-lush-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Price’s New LUSH LIFE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium<\/strong>
\nBy CHARLES McGRATH in the New York Times<\/a>
\nPublished: March 2, 2008<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a><\/p>\n

YOU might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price<\/a> has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer place out on the Island; his work has earned him an Edgar award for television writing, an Academy Award nomination and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But Mr. Price, who grew up in the Parkside Projects, has shed neither his Bronx accent nor any of his street-smarts.<\/p>\n

He is still wary, even a little jumpy at times. Walking around the Lower East Side, where his new novel, \u201cLush Life,\u201d is set, he could easily be mistaken for one of the locals. Pale, thin, high-strung, with the baggy eyes of someone who doesn\u2019t get enough sleep, he could even be a guy looking to score a little coke \u2014 something Mr. Price admits to doing with regularity back in the \u201980s. He walks quickly, jokes a lot without smiling much, and, as readers of his books know, has a pitch-perfect mastery of urban speech in all its varieties. He may be the only middle-aged white man in America who can say \u201cTrue dat\u201d without sounding ridiculous.<\/p>\n

\"Mr.<\/a><\/p>\n

Now 58, Mr. Price published his first book, \u201cThe Wanderers,\u201d set in the blue-collar Bronx of his childhood, when he was just 24 and barely out of Cornell \u2014 from which he emerged, he has said, even streetier and more Bronx-sounding than when he began \u2014 and the M.F.A. program at Columbia, where his models were Hubert Selby and Lenny Bruce<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He has published steadily every since, eventually turning from more or less autobiographical work to books like \u201cClockers\u201d and \u201cFreedomland,\u201d big, Dickensian novels about the drug trade and life in the projects. He has also written the screenplays for \u201cClockers,\u201d \u201cThe Color of Money\u201d (for which he received the Oscar nomination), \u201cSea of Love\u201d and \u201cMad Dog and Glory,\u201d among other movies, and recently he has written some episodes for the HBO<\/a> series \u201cThe Wire,\u201d which won him the Edgar. He\u2019s one of a handful of contemporary novelists to work for Hollywood and emerge more or less unscathed.<\/p>\n

[ click to view full New York Times article<\/a> ]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium By CHARLES McGRATH in the New York Times Published: March 2, 2008 YOU might not know it to look at him, but the novelist Richard Price has over the years picked up what one of his characters might call some cheddar. He has a house in Gramercy Park and a summer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}