Richard Price..

is interviewed in a neat little piece in which Price talks about his involvement with HBO's The Wire, his upcoming novel Lush Life, and Clockers, his breakout book that's being re released next month to coincide with the new book.
"But around the time of Clockers, it was like the end of days. With crack, the projects had become terminals. In the projects, generations always moved on from the generation that was born in the projects. Now you had generations stacked up in the same apartment. Drugs were devastating that world—completely ghettoized. All the white people had fled. Jobs weren't there, and drugs were the only viable alternative. So either people were dealing drugs—but that's not true. There were people doing drugs, there were people dealing drugs—that's the way that people made money, and that's what you saw. But there were probably just as many kids who were going to school, but those kids didn't make the papers. You don't wind up in the newspaper for graduating from high school with a B- average and going to a community college. It's just not newsworthy. That was the great invisible in there—all these kids that weren't succumbing. I tried to capture that too in Clockers. But the drama and the nihilism of that era was the ascension of crack, and the devastation."

Great book, along with Freedomland.

Link via Sarah

Posted by Dave