Sleepy-Eyed Writer, Wandering Byzantium

“About the Lower East Side today,’ Mr. Price said, ‘This place is like Byzantium. It’s tomorrow, yesterday — anyplace but today.’ ... ‘Lush Life’ took so long to finish, he said, in part because he spent so much time researching it — talking to people, riding around with the neighborhood police and sometimes just walking around. ‘I always like to hang out,’ he said, ‘because, one, it’s a way of avoiding really writing; and, two, sometimes God is a crackerjack novelist and you can plagiarize the hell out of him.’ He particularly liked hanging out with cops, he said, ‘because I’m so not a cop myself. Being with them gets me out of my own self-consciousness.’”