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Hubert Selby, Jr.,
was born in Brooklyn (1928), and went to sea as a merchant marine
while still in his teens. Laid low by lung disease, he was, after
a decade of hospitalizations, written off as a goner and sent home
to die. Deciding instead to live, but having no way to make a living,
he came to a realization that would change the course of literature:
"I knew the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer." Drawing
from the soul of his Brooklyn neighborhood, he began writing something
called The Queen Is Dead, which evolved, after
six years, into his first novel, Last
Exit to Brooklyn (1964), a book that Allen
Ginsberg predicted would "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell
over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years."
Damned
and praised with equal fire, Last Exit to Brooklyn
more than fulfilled the first part of Ginsberg's prophecy; and today,
thirty-five years later, it is well on its way to fulfilling the
latter: standing as the first breath and testament of a wholly new
poetic, as a classic not only of contemporary literature but of
the literature of the ages as well. Even The New York Times would
be compelled to recognize "Selby's place in the front rank of American
novelists," to see in his work "the power, the intimacy with suffering
and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Dostoevsky's," and
to say that, "To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish
of America."
Selby's
second novel, The
Room (1971), considered by some to be his masterpiece,
received, as Selby said, "the greatest reviews I've ever read in
my life," then rapidly vanished leaving barely a trace of its existence.
Over the years, however, especially in Europe, The Room
has come to be recognized as what Selby himself perceives it to
be: the most disturbing book ever written, a book that he himself
was unable to read again for twenty years after writing it.
"A man obsessed / is a man possessed / by a demon." Thus
the defining epigraph of The
Demon (1976), a novel that, like The Room,
has been better understood and more widely embraced abroad than
at home.
If
The Room is Selby's own favorite among his books, Requiem
for a Dream (1978) contains his favorite opening line: "Harry
locked his mother in the closet." It is perhaps the truest and
most horrific tale of heroin addiction ever written. Requiem
for a Dream has been brought to the screen
(10/2000) by Darren
Aronofsky, director of the 1998 film Pi.
Song
of the Silent Snow (1986) brought together fifteen
stories whose writing spanned more than twenty years.
In 1989 Last Exit to Brooklyn
was made into a film by the German director Uli
Edel, a film in which Selby himself made a cameo appearance.
The
novel remains his most famous, and infamous, book; and in 1997 Selby
recorded the whole of it, forthcoming in 1998 as a multi-CD boxed
set under the aegis of Henry
Rollins, who worked with Selby on the 1990 CD Our Fathers
Who Aren't in Heaven and in 1995 released Selby's Live
in Europe 1989.
Selby's work has appeared through the years in Yugen, Black Mountain
Review, Evergreen Review, Provincetown Review, Kulchur, New Directions
Annual, Swank, Open City, and other publications.
The
Willow Tree, a long-awaited new novel, his first since 1978,
was published in the spring of 1998, by the London-based house of
Marion Boyars Ltd. Selby lives in Los Angeles, and is at work on
an autobiographical novel, tentatively titled Seeds of Pain,
Seeds of Love.
Of
him, Nick
Tosches, his conspirator in Blue
Eyes and Exit Wounds, says: "To begin to define Selby's
brilliance and power, you have to go back to the rhythms of Homer,
Hesiod, and Sappho; back to the dark and light and beauty of Dante;
and back to what lay beyond and beneath that sign on the Belt Parkway
from which he took the title of his first novel. Everything that
Herman Melville, that other great ex-seaman, and no stranger to
Brooklyn, is held up to be in the pantheon of American literature,
Hubert Selby, Jr., is. What Moby Dick was to Melville's century,
Last Exit to Brooklyn is to ours, and between the two, Selby's
is the better book. If that be called heresy, know that it be called
so only by those of the same dead mind as they who allowed Melville
to die unknown.
There
are only a few American writers who are in Selby's league, and in
a wholly different way: Peter Matthiessen at his best; Philip Roth,
maybe, when he takes off his yarmulke. And if you want to talk about
living fucking legends, when it comes to writers, Selby is the only
game in town. I mean, this guy should be wearing fucking laurel
leaves and pulling down a million a year."
Listen
to Blue Eyes and
Exit Wounds CD sample tracks.
(Requires free
Real Player)
BOOKS BY HUBERT
SELBY, JR.
(Click title for more info, or to order)
LAST
EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1964)
THE
ROOM (1971)
THE DEMON (1976)
REQUIEM
FOR A DREAM (1978)
SONG
OF THE SILENT SNOW (1986)
THE
WILLOW TREE (1998)
WAITING
PERIOD (2002)
SPOKEN WORD CD's
BLUE EYES AND EXIT
WOUNDS (with Nick Tosches)
LIVE
IN EUROPE 1989 (with Henry Rollins)
WRITER - FILMOGRAPHY
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) (novel, screenplay)
LAST
EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989) (novel)
JOUR
et NUIT (1986) (screenplay)
ARTICLES,
INTERVIEWS, ETC.
THE
POOL ROOM (Salon.com, audio)
Why
I Continue to Write (L.A. Weekly 2/26/99)
FILM
& TV APPEARANCES
Hubert Selby Jr., 2 ou 3 choses...
(2000)
Scotch
and Milk (1998)
Drug-Taking and the Arts (1994)
LAST
EXIT TO BROOKLYN (1989)
The Huntress (2000) (TV)
REQUIEM
FOR A DREAM (2000)
ABOUT
HUBERT SELBY, JR.
Understanding
Hubert Selby, Jr.
by James Richard Giles
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