Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Get Lit is back. We are kicking things off in 2025 with a really exciting January selection, Lazarus Man by Richard Price. Richard is a celebrated novelist and screenwriter. You know his work on The Wire and The Night Of on HBO. His new novel is set in East Harlem in 2008. It tells the story of the aftermath of a tenement building collapse that leaves many dead, injured, and missing. Central to the novel are four characters whose lives were affected by this tragedy, including one man, Anthony, who survives in the rubble for more than 24 hours before being rescued. Thanks to our partners at the New York Public Library, there are unlimited e-copies of the novel available to borrow. Head to wnyc.org/getlit to find out more. You can also get your free tickets to our January 28th event with Richard Price, who joins me now for a Get Lit preview. Richard, welcome to All Of It.

Richard Price: Oh, thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: We're so excited about this novel. It's great, by the way.

Richard Price: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: What was the first seed of the idea of Lazarus Man?

Richard Price: The first seed was moving to Harlem in 2008. I had just finished a book on the Lower East Side: Lush Life. It was kind of panoramic. Once I moved to Harlem, I didn't know anything, but at some point, I wanted to know enough to be able to write a similar panorama of this world that I found myself in.

Alison Stewart: [crosstalk] Richard, I was going to ask you to read-- Yes, you go. You go.

Richard Price: No, you go.

Alison Stewart: No, you go.

Richard Price: Oh, sorry.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Richard Price: 2014, there was a building collapse about 14 blocks south of me in East Harlem. I just not only heard it in my house, but it just shook my bones. I went down there and tenement had completely-- It was a continent explosion. The tenement was completely gone. There were six fatalities, I think, or eight. I just spent all day down there just watching what happened and reactions of people. Even then, I didn't realize this was going to be the center of my book for another two years. I was still learning my world.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read a little selection from the book. This is a perspective of Felix, who lives across the street of the moment when the building collapses.

Richard Price: Right. Felix is a young photographer who literally lives like 50 feet across the street. He gets home and it's late. It's the wee hours. He finally falls asleep at 6:00. Here goes. At 8:00 in the morning, as he was finally drifting off and heard the abrupt harsh clatter and buckshot pop of shattered glass suddenly raining down on the street, he was just too tired to get up, go to the window, and check it out. Oddly enough, what jerked him fully awake a minute later, what felt to him like the striking of some ancient chord in his gut, was the absolute silence that followed. It lasted no more than a few swollen seconds, just enough to establish itself as silence before giving way to dozens of car alarms going off from one end of the block to the other, seemingly without cause, as if in the grip of a mass timer malfunction.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw one of his walls start to flutter. He thought he was still asleep. He thought he was dreaming, had to be, until a tremendous concussion of sound and invisible everywhere precaution threw him out of bed and rolled him across the narrow floor until he came up face first against the opposite wall, the impact bloodying his nose. When he finally sat up, staring stupidly at the sky through his window, all that he could see of the outside world was a night-for-day roiling black cloud, which by the time he was able to get to his feet, had turned to filthy white but no less dense.

It had to be what he always imagined would happen one day, the Metro-North train rounding that killer curve up there too fast, flying off the tracks like an arrow and burying itself into the side of a building. Mastering the wobbles, he got himself into sweatpants and a pair of flip-flops and bolted for the building stairway to scope out the damage on the street. He was already two flights down, the smutty contents of that apocalyptic cloud already seeking out his lungs, when he stopped, wheeled, and headed back up to the apartment in order to grab his Nikon.

Alison Stewart: That is Richard Price reading from Lazarus Man. We have Felix, the photographer. We have Anthony. When we first meet Anthony, where is he in his life?

Richard Price: Nowhere. He's in his early 40s. His whole life has been a slippery slope. He started out as an undergraduate at Columbia. Kicked out for dealing drugs in the dorms, and it just kept going down. He wound up in lesser and lesser schools, wound up being an English teacher. Was almost brained by a kid in a class in the Bronx who had an arm cast on. Sued the Board of Ed. Started becoming a salesman on the floor of men's shops. Slipped into cocaine usage, which was something he had thought he had left behind. Lost his wife and his stepdaughter. They just said, "We can't take it." At this point in his life, he's got an interview for a job at a men's shop and he's about to feel like his life is about to become normal yet again.

Alison Stewart: Mary is a local cop. She becomes determined to find someone missing in the collapse. Why is she so determined to find this missing person herself rather than pass it along?

Richard Price: Well, because her father, who had been a welterweight, almost killed someone in the ring. In fact, the person had died from that beating a couple years later. The picture of this missing guy, he looked just like the guy her father killed, slow motion killed. Something got tangled up in her and she said, "I don't know if he's dead or alive, but I'm going to find him." Cops do things, pick cases, pick up sessions for reasons that are very tied into their biographies. People, victims trigger something in some cops while the same victims trigger nothing in other cops, but those other cops, they have their own obsessions. Everybody's obsession is not understood by everybody else. Everybody has a biography and it comes out and try to save that victim or just get justice for that victim.

Alison Stewart: Finally, Royal Davis is the owner of struggling funeral home. What would you describe as his first reaction at the building collapse?

Richard Price: Oh, money.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles]

Richard Price: He gets his 12-year-old kid to the collapse site and has the kid pass out business cards for the Royal Davis Funeral Home. When the kid says to him, "Dad, why can't you do it?", the father says,' Well, it wouldn't look right."

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Richard Price: His business is crumbling. You need like five, six bodies a month just to meet your nut as a funeral proprietor. He's down to two or three and he's kind of desperate. He's holding on by his fingernails.

Alison Stewart: We always ask our authors if there's one thing you would like our readers to pay special attention to when they're reading. Any Easter eggs, any details that you're particularly proud of?

Richard Price: Mary Rose trajectory, she's a 40-year-old community affairs cop. She has this phobia about crossing state lines, so the only place they could put her was in community affairs, which is something happens on the street, your job is to go out there and prevent people from getting hotter than they are. She's very good at calming people down. She's in a dissolving marriage that keeps congealing and dissolving. She has kids she doesn't know how to relate to. I love her, but I like everybody. You could also pay attention to everything I wrote since kindergarten, but I would settle if you only just started with my first book, The Wanderers, in 1974. Kidding.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Well, people have time. They'll whip through this one and they can start with your-- overrushing the whole thing. Richard Price, we are so excited to have you be our Get Lit with All Of It book club event. We will see you on the 28th.

Richard Price: Oh, can't wait. Can't hardly wait.

Alison Stewart: Our Get Lit with All Of It event with Richard Price is on Tuesday, January 28th, at 6:00 PM. Tickets are free. You can get them now and find out how to check out the book by heading to the wnyc/getlit. You might want to get those. They tend to go fast.