When Last Exit to Brooklyn was published by Grove Press in 1964 it was startling, to say the least. Hubert Selby Jr.’s firecracker of a novel took an unflinching look at class in America, and at the minefields we set around queerness and gender. It was a bald and wholly unflattering portrayal that was uncomfortable in the extreme. So much so, the book was banned in the UK and in Italy. But considering its sensationalism, this treasure of underground queerness has been somewhat eclipsed by the more well worn odes to transgression that came out of the turn of the 20th century. A merchant marine, Selby wrote what he knew. He set his book in the working class wilds of the Brooklyn waterfront in the 1950s, and populated it with characters macerated in the cruelty and self-oppression that frequently accompanies male articulations of power, or the lack of it. Last Exit to Brooklyn is an uncompromising rendering of the violence that follows in its wake, and includes toe-curling depictions of the sex trade, gang rape, domestic violence, and the intricacies of street-life for the queer dispossessed. If you can escape Selby’s idiosyncratic, Beat literary devices, Last Exit to Brooklyn’s pill-fueled orgies and bar room brawls are drenched in a compelling despair. And his depictions of the hierarchies found within the labor movement are densely packed with an inescapable authenticity.