Richard Price: Lazarus Man

Richard Price, “the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced” (Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review), celebrates the launch of his long-awaited new novel with a reading and wide-ranging conversation with bestselling novelist Garth Risk Hallberg (City on Fire).

In bestselling, acclaimed novels like Clockers, Lush Life, and The Whites — and iconic screenwriting for television and film like The Wire, The Night Of, The Color of Money, and more — Richard Price has distinguished himself as one of the great city storytellers that America has produced in a generation. In electrifying dialogue and unforgettable characters, his writing cuts to the core, comprising works of riveting suspense and expansive vision.

In his new novel, Lazarus Man — his first in nine years — he creates an unforgettable, intertwined portrait of East Harlem in 2008. Following the fallout of a five-story tenement building’s collapse into a fuming hill of rubble — leaving six dead and many others missing — Price tells the story of the lives who are forever transformed by the disaster, and a community on the brink of ruin. At the launch of its publication, weaving together grand social vision and gripping drama, hear one of America’s major storytellers discuss his brand new, magnificent New York saga.

Praise for Lazarus Man:

“[A] masterwork of character, atmosphere, [and] symbolism . . . [Price] remains one of the most rewarding, compulsively readable fiction writers around . . . There is no better bard of everyday life in urban America . . . The wandering souls of Lazarus Man are all searching for something, and the disaster at the novel’s center sends them into the same orbit and pushes them toward transformation. This, too, is what great novelists do. They turn readers into different people than they were when they picked up the book they can’t put down.”
— Chris Vognar, San Francisco Chronicle

“Half a century after launching an astonishing career that includes some of the best crime writing for books and screens, Richard Price has let the mercy in his stories rise to the surface . . . For a nation riven and terrified, Lazarus Man is the strangest of urban thrillers: a thoughtful, even peaceful story about stumbling into new life."
— Ron Charles, The Washington Post