Lush Life.

"Miramax Films and producer Scott Rudin have acquired screen rights to Richard Price's novel Lush Life," reports Variety's Michael Fleming. "Price, who recently won the Edgar Award for his script work on HBO series The Wire will write the script.... Price's other script-work includes The Color of Money, Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory and adaptations of his novels Clockers, Freedomland, Bloodbrothers and The Wanderers."

And he and his new novel have been the talk of the books pages for weeks now, starting, of course, with the New York Times. Reviewing Lush Life for the Book Review, Walter Kirn finds not only Raymond Chandler "peeping out from Price's skull" but evidence of "Saul Bellow's vision, too." Besides an earlier review from Michiko Kakutani, the NYT also offers a profile of Price by Charles McGrath, an excerpt and a page devoted to a thorough list of related reviews, articles and interviews. And you can listen to Price on the NYTBR podcast.

"Post-Giuliani, Manhattan's once-edgy Lower East Side seems like a Wi-Fi wonderland, a kind of theme park where, as writer Richard Price has observed, young would-be artists flit between coffee shops, pretending to live in a never-ending production of Rent," writes Maud Newton in the Boston Globe. Lush Life "explores the collision between the old and new Lower East Sides, the disconnect between the faux-Bohemians who swan through the streets, coked up, in their moccasins, and the kids from the projects who are forever being stopped and frisked by the Quality of Life Task Force."

"At times Lush Life takes the reader in too many directions, inside too many heads of intensely conflicted characters," writes Carolyn Alessio in the Chicago Tribune. "But Price, who writes with the psychological intensity of PD James, seems determined not to let anyone have the last word."

Posted by dwhudson at March 17, 2008 11:28 AM