Most Popular Books by Richard Price

Crack-dealers known as "Clockers" are at the bottom of the drug-dealing ladder, and they must commit murder to rise higher.

So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he''s thirty-five years old and he''s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn''t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that''s Eric''s version. In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

In the early 18th century, the Dutch colony of Suriname was the envy of all others in the Americas. There, seven hundred Europeans lived off the labor of over four thousand enslaved Africans. Owned by men hell-bent for quick prosperity, the rich plantations on the Suriname river became known for their heights of planter comfort and opulence--and for their depths of slave misery. Slaves who tried to escape were hunted by the planter militia. If found they were publicly tortured. Gradually slaves began to form outlaw communities until nearly one out of every ten Africans in Suriname was helping to build rebel villages in the jungle. This book relates the history of a nation founded by escaped slaves deep in the Latin American rain forest. It tells of their battles for independence, their uneasy truce with the colonial government, and the attempt of their leader, Alabi, to reconcile his people with white law and a white God.

Milieu des annees quatre-vingt-dix. Le jeune Billy Graves est flic au sein d''une brigade anticriminalite de l''un des pires districts du Bronx. Il fait partie d''un groupe de policiers prometteurs, les Wild Geese, et une carriere brillante lui semble assuree. Jusqu''au jour ou il tire accidentellement sur un gamin. L''affaire, fortement mediatisee, lui vaut d''etre mis au placard quelque temps. Aujourd''hui, Billy est devenu chef d''une equipe de nuit du NYPD. Son quotidien: sillonner les rues de New York, de Wall Street a Harlem, pour en assurer la securite, meme s''il sait que certains criminels passeront toujours au travers des mailles du filet. Ces derniers, il les surnomme les whites, ceux qui s''en sortent blancs comme neige. Chaque policier en a un qui l''obsede. Puis vient un appel qui change tout: un meurtre a eu lieu a Penn Station. Et la victime n''est autre que le white d''un de ses anciens coequipiers. Lorsqu''un autre white est assassine, Billy commence a s''interroger: quelqu''un serait-il en train de regler ses comptes? Et qui est cet homme qui, soudainement, parait s''interesser a sa femme et a ses enfants, au point de les suivre en filature?"

Ray Mitchell, a former TV writer who has left Hollywood under a cloud, returns to urban Dempsy, New Jersey, hoping to make a difference in the lives of his struggling neighbors. Instead, his very public and emotionally suspect generosity gets him beaten nearly to death. Ray refuses to name his assailant, which makes him intensely interesting to Detective Nerese Ammons, a friend from childhood, who now sets out to unlock the secret of his reticence. Set against the intensely realized backdrop of urban America, the cat and mouse game that unfolds is both morally complex and utterly gripping.

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. Anthony Carter—whose miraculous survival, after being buried for days beneath tons of brick and stone, transforms him into a man with a message and a passionate sense of mission. Felix Pearl—a young transplant to the city, whose photography and film work that day provokes in this previously unformed soul a sharp sense of personal destiny. Royal Davis—owner of a failing Harlem funeral home, whose desperate trolling of the scene for potential “customers” triggers a quest to find another path in life. And Mary Roe—a veteran city detective who, driven in part by her own family’s brutal history, becomes obsessed with finding Christopher Diaz, one of the building’s missing. Price, the bestselling author of Lush Life and, most recently, The Whites, has created a bravura portrait of a community on the edge of disintegration. Rich with indelible characters and high drama, Lazarus Man is a riveting work of suspense and social vision by one of our major writers.

Thirty-five years into his research among the descendants of rebel slaves living in the South American rain forest, anthropologist Richard Price encountered Tooy, a priest, philosopher, and healer living in a rough shantytown on the outskirts of Cayenne, French Guiana. Tooy is a time traveler who crosses boundaries between centuries, continents, the worlds of the living and the dead, and the visible and invisible. With an innovative blend of storytelling and scholarship, Travels with Tooy recounts the mutually enlightening and mind-expanding journeys of these two intellectuals. Included on the itinerary for this hallucinatory expedition: forays into the eighteenth century to talk with slaves newly arrived from Africa; leaps into the midst of battles against colonial armies; close encounters with double agents and femme fatale forest spirits; and trips underwater to speak to the comely sea gods who control the world’s money supply. This enchanting book draws on Price’s long-term ethnographic and archival research, but above all on Tooy’s teachings, songs, stories, and secret languages to explore how Africans in the Americas have created marvelous new worlds of the imagination.

Concerns the increase of the public debt due to the cost of the war with the American colonies.

Kenny Becker just dumped his girlfriend--the reasons are a little complex. Young and newly unemployed, his main assets at the moment are six-pack abs and a healthy libido--he''s ready to get out, find a little action, and maybe find himself too. But New York is no place for the lonely, and with one meaningless sexual encounter after another, Kenny begins to wonder if the singles scene is not itself a complete con job, with his heart and his future at stake. Raunchy, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, this 1978 clubland slice-of-life displays Richard Price in gritty good form.

The "extraordinary" novel of a teenage gang in the 1960s Bronx, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Clockers and The Whites ( Newsweek). The basis for the feature film, The Wanderers tells the story of teenagers on the streets of New York City, coming of age and drifting apart. Tormented by cold-hearted girls and cold-blooded ten-year-olds, maniacal rivals and murderous parents, they are caught between juveniles and adults in a gritty novel filled with "switchblade prose" and "dialogue [that] has the immediacy of overheard subway conversation"—from an award-winning author renowned for his writing on HBO''s The Wire and The Night Of, as well as such modern-day classics as Lush Life and Bloodbrothers ( Newsweek). "A kind of teenage Godfather with its own tight structure of morality, loyalty, survival, and reprisal." — Los Angeles Free Press "The flip side of American Graffiti . . . an amalgam of sex, violence, and humor, glued together with superb dialogue and unsentimental sensitivity." — Rolling Stone "A superbly written book . . . insights that allow us—at times force us—to feel closer to other human beings whether we like and approve of them or not." — The New York Times Book Review

Price traces the shape of historical thought among peoples who had previously been denied any history at all. Each page of the book presents a transcript of oral histories told by living Saramakas about their 18th century ancestors, with additional commentary.

The celebrated author of Clockers delivers his most compelling and accomplished novel to date. A white woman, her hands gashed and bloody, stumbles into an inner-city emergency room and announces that she has just been carjacked by a black man. But then comes the horrifying twist: Her young son was asleep in the back seat, and he has now disappeared into the night. So begins Richard Price''s electrifying new novel, a tale set on the same turf--Dempsey, New Jersey--as Clockers. Assigned to investigate the case of Brenda Martin''s missing child is detective Lorenzo Council, a local son of the very housing project targeted as the scene of the crime. Under a white-hot media glare, Lorenzo launches an all-out search for the abducted boy, even as he quietly explores a different possibility: Does Brenda Martin know a lot more about her son''s disappearance than she''s admitting? Right behind Lorenzo is Jesse Haus, an ambitious young reporter from the city''s evening paper. Almost immediately, Jesse suspects Brenda of hiding something. Relentlessly, she works her way into the distraught mother''s fragile world, befriending her even as she looks for the chance to break the biggest story of her career. As the search for the alleged carjacker intensifies, so does the simmering racial tension between Dempsey and its mostly white neighbor, Gannon. And when the Gannon police arrest a black man from Dempsey and declare him a suspect, the animosity between the two cities threatens to boil over into violence. With the media swarming and the mood turning increasingly ugly, Lorenzo must take desperate measures to get to the bottom of Brenda Martin''s story. At once a suspenseful mystery and a brilliant portrait of two cities locked in a death-grip of explosive rage, Freedomland reveals the heart of the urban American experience--dislocated, furious, yearning--as never before. Richard Price has created a vibrant, gut-wrenching masterpiece whose images will remain long after the final, devastating pages.