Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. Her career-spanning book of essays The Hard Crowd, solidified her place of authority amongst today’s writers, covering everything from a Palestinian refugee camp to her young life in the San Francisco music scene. Kushner has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Ottessa Moshfegh is a stand-out in contemporary literature. With worlds and minds that manage to be both dark and intricate, as well as elegant and neurotic, her writing trails a unique and poignant thread of what it means to live in the now. She is the author of the novels My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Eileen, the novella McGlue, the short story collection Homesick for Another World, and she has three film adaptations in the works. Her newest book, Lapvona, is a medieval fantasy set in a fictional village struggling with the sordid aftermath of a plague; “part Dostoevsky, part Poe, and entirely her own” (The Millions), the book showcases Moshfegh at seemingly her darkest.

Rachel Kushner reads her story “A King Alone” from the July 11 & 18, 2022, issue of the magazine. Kushner has published three novels, “Telex from Cuba,” “The Flamethrowers,” and “The Mars Room,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Her most recent book, “The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020,” came out last year. 

Rachel Kushner joins Deborah Treisman to read and discuss “Come Into the Drawing Room, Doris,” by Edna O’Brien, which was published in The New Yorker in 1962. Kushner is the author of three novels and most recently the essay collection “The Hard Crowd,” which was published last year.

We were joined by two of the most radical and exciting voices in anglophone literature, Rob Doyle and Rachel Kushner, for a discussion of art, class, truth and how much of a ‘sick puppy’ Georges Bataille really was.Buy Rob Doyle’s Threshold here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781526607089/thresholdBuy Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/d/9781787333109/the-hard-crowdBrowse our online store here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/15/online-store/16/bookstoreBecome a Friend of S&Co here: https://friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com*Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles.Rob Doyle was born in Dublin. His first novel, Here Are the Young Men, was published in 2014. It was chosen as a book of the year by the Sunday Times, Irish Times and Independent, and was among Hot Press magazine's '20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016'. Doyle has adapted it for a film with director Eoin Macken. Doyle's collection of short stories, This is the Ritual, was published by Bloomsbury in 2016. Doyle is the editor of the The Other Irish Tradition (Dalkey Archive Press), and In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep (Broken Dimanche Press). His writing has appeared in the Guardian, Vice, TLS, Dublin Review, and many other publications, and he writes a weekly books column for the Irish Times. He teaches on the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Limerick, and lives the rest of the year in Berlin.Follow Rob on Twitter here: @RobDoyle1*Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Buy a signed copy of his novel FEEDING TIME here: https://shakespeareandcompany.com/S/9781910296684/feeding-time

A conversation about life as art with the author of The Flamethrowers. Few merge writing about art and writing about life the way Rachel Kushner does. A former editor at Artforum and Bomb, she’s deeply interested in memorializing the culture around the art—the conversations, the characters, the tall tales. In her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, a National Book Award finalist, the New York art world of the 70s was brought to scintillating life; and in her new collection of essays, The Hard Crowd, she writes about Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon, and Jeff Koons as vividly as she writes about her deep personal passion for motorcycles and muscle cars.You can order The Hard Crowd now.

Our guest this month is the novelist Rachel Kushner, who we have been huge fans of ever since we read her novel The Flamethrowers. Rachel’s latest book is a collection of essays, The Hard Crowd. Though it covers a lot of ground, the collection returns often to the rebels and misfits and outsiders living on the edge of society - a theme in her fiction too. Inspired by Rachel's work, for this show we're talking about ‘hard crowds’ in literature, from the ultraviolent gang in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange to musicians living on the edge in their memoirs. So, climb on the back of our hogs and take a ride with us for the next hour of Literary Friction… Recommendations on the theme, Hard Crowds:Octavia: Nicotine by Nell Zink https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/nicotine?variant=32557710442574Carrie: Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson https://us.macmillan.com/author/denisjohnson/General recommendations:Octavia: No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/no-one-is-talking-about-this-9781526629760/Rachel: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen https://www.penguin.co.uk/authors/138738/tove-ditlevsen.htmlCarrie: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John Le Carre https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/306/306246/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy/9780241330890.htmlSupport us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/litfriction Email us: litfriction@gmail.com Tweet us & find us on Instagram: @litfriction Find lists of our recommendations at: http://uk.bookshop.org/shop/litfriction, where you can also order books while supporting independent bookshops This episode is sponsored by Picador: https://www.panmacmillan.com/picador

Rachel Kushner is the author of several novels including The Mars Room and The Flamethrowers.  Her work has been compared to Joan Didion’s, and that of Don DeLillo, a literary mentor to Kushner. Kushner’s newest book, The Hard Crowd, is a collection of essays from the past 20 years that showcase her intellect and diverse interests, from muscle cars to postmodern art and politics.  She has received grants and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. On April 29, 2021, Rachel Kushner talked with Heidi Julavits about the art of writing and the places and people that inspire her.

Already well-known for her novels – Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner has over the past two decades been writing essays, reviews and reportage as insightful and surprising as her fiction. In The Hard Crowd (Jonathan Cape) she has selected 19 pieces, covering diverse topics: art, literature, music, politics with essays on Marguerite Duras, Jeff Koons, wildcat strikes, a visit to a Palestinian refugee Camp and the music scene of her hometown San Francisco.She talks about her work with art critic and frequent contributor to the LRB Professor Hal Foster.Buy the books here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rachel Kushner’s “The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020” is a career-spanning collection of nineteen essays.

The writer Rachel Kushner has an excellent new book of essays out now. It’s called The Hard Crowd. On this episode of the Apology podcast, Jesse Pearson speaks with Rachel about various topics she covers in the book (Marguerite Duras, prison abolition, motorcycle life) and some extra stuff too (Thom Jones, artists as writers, reading recommendations based on Rachel’s novels). Plus more, always more.