Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Urban Tensions - Hubert Selby Jr."s Last Exit to Brooklyn

2015; Volume: 5; Linguagem: Inglês

10.15299/local.2015.11.5.193

2234-5663

Łukasz Muniowski,

Race, History, and American Society

In one of the few studies devoted to Hubert Selby Jr.'s fiction, Josephine Hendin characterizes him as a “surrealist of the streets.” 1 The writer, whose body of work consists of six novels and a collection of short stories, was primarily concerned with oppression and resistance. He was one of the most notorious authors of transgressive fiction of the twentieth century, and a prime example of his powerful writing is his 1964 debut, Last Exit to Brooklyn. Banned in Italy and subjected to an obscenity trial in the United Kingdom, it quickly became an underground classic. Now Selby is mostly forgotten, and his works rarely appear even in the bookstores of his native Brooklyn, 2 let alone become topics of academic analysis, but his first novel remains a profound presentation of inner-city tensions and divisions within a small community. The six stories, connected by their location and the street gang that appears in almost all of them, depict an environment devoid of justice, equality or