New edition of the perennial cult classic with a specially commissioned introduction by Irvine Welsh
Roberk Beck, who used the moniker Iceberg Slim, was a major league pimp who enjoyed serious sucess during the 40s and 50s. He decided to leave the pimping game having served his third and final stretch in jail. He moved to Los Angeles where he straightened out and began a career as a writer. Pimp was originally published in 1967.
* Slim belongs to the knuckle-duster-in-the-face school of storytelling. Sunday Times * Slim always told it as it was, without compromise. -- Irvine Welsh * Pimp is hot and frantic, a remarkable tour de force of carnality and violence. The Times * Iceberg Slim does for the pimp what Jean Genet did for the thief. Washington Post * Pimp is an eye-boggling netherworld documentary, a tear-arse tale of ferocious emotion, expressed through action. Q magazine * Iceberg Slim always kept it real. It is blatant, uncompromising, and as close to the truth as you can get without going there yourself. -- Ice T * This brutally honest memoir...is as shocking today as ever. A precursor of 40 years of black-street culture, this is uncompromising and harrowing, but a landmark book nonetheless. Big Issue
With raw and forceful writing, Slim held nothing back in this fictionalized 1969 autobiography, which helped establish the framework for 21st-century street lit. Today's writers would do well to use it as a primer. Violence against women, the struggle of reentering society after prison, and harsh street life are depicted on every page. Still ringing with power four decades after it was first published, Pimp is also a story about overcoming the streets and getting clean from drug abuse. VERDICT Buy it without question. Cornerstones of street lit are spelled out by one stunning sentence when a whore talks back to Slim while in his car. "If I had been ten years dumber, I would of leaned out of that Hog and broken her jaw, and put my foot in her ass, but the joint was too fresh in my mind." (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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