The Breaks

By Richard Price

Book Overview

From the author of Clockers and Lush Life comes this "glorious, gritty comedy" (The New Yorker) Richard Price's The Breaks.

Peter Keller, first college grad from a working-class Yonkers family, thought he was on the road to success. Until no law school wanted him. As he watches his friends advance into promising careers, he jumps from job to job---mail clerk, phone solicitor, stand-up comic---until he breaks down and starts phoning in bomb threats on his own house. He's going to have to work hard to change the pattern of self-sabotage that has defined most of his life. And taking that job at his alma mater as a teacher of freshman comp and starting an affair with a violently psychotic ex-wife of a colleague probably won't help matters. Richard Price's brilliant comic novel is a classic tale of a young man trying to find his place in the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312566514
• ISBN13: 9780312566517
• Release Date: June 2011
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

This book should NOT be out of print!

Richard Price is one of America's greatest authors. He is the millennial link between literature and cinema. And it is a sin that this book, the missing link between his early personal, cinematic works, and his later, directly cinematic social treatises, should be missing. The "Mickey's Monkey" scene alone is a classic.

Funny and insightful

"The Breaks" is one of the funniest books I have ever read. I've read interviews with Richard Price where he calls this book and his other classic, "Ladies Man", his early "bad" efforts. No way! In "The Breaks" you get several novels for the price of one---all of them great! There's the protagonist's hilarious adventures with depression after college(really!); his earnest but hapless return to his college town; his not-quite-successful romance with a woman a few years older and several decades smarter than him; his sudden urge to be a stand-up comic; and his scary/funny rivalry with his girlfriend's ex-husband. I've owned "The Breaks" for about ten years, and I still reread it periodically when I want a laugh. Mr. Price, you have at least one enthusiastic fan of "The Breaks"!