Our Harlem neighbor, the novelist Richard Price (think The Wanderers, Clockers, and The Wire) has a new novel - Lazarus Man. He was interviewed for Publishers’ Weekly:

“Price’s dialogue—whether New York cop-speak or street slang—is evocative and witty, while his artful explorations of human nature are windows into worlds beyond our own. Both are clearly on display in Lazarus Man. In the wake of the tenement collapse, the novel follows Anthony Carter, an unemployed former addict who’s pulled from the rubble and becomes a media sensation, all the while hiding a secret; Mary Roe, a cop obsessed with finding one of the missing residents; Felix Pearl, a mixed-race photographer searching for his “true tribe” in a gentrifying Harlem; and Royal Davis, a funeral parlor owner who hopes the collapse will generate business.”

“As the book unfolds, Price tenderly explores the emotional lives and romantic entanglements of his characters. Mary struggles to navigate a platonic relationship with her ex-husband while dating a man who wants more than she can give. Anthony falls for a woman from the neighborhood, exposing himself to rejection and pain.”

“A real-life building collapse in 2014 near Price’s home sparked the idea for Lazarus Man, his first work set in Harlem. “When that building fell, I felt it in my jawbone—the boom, the vibrations—and I was down there in half an hour, picking up this POV, that POV,” Price says. “If I’d written about Harlem the first year after I moved here it would’ve sounded like a Popeye travelogue. But after a while, when the amazing becomes normal, when your eyes and mind calm down, that’s when you pick up on nuances. Sometimes, you can go to the corner store for mint Milanos and come back with a chapter. It’s just living.””

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