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Rachel Kushner on hard living and fearless writing

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The Greatest American Novels you should read

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Daisy Johnson, Rachel Kushner and Richard Powers shortlisted for Man Booker Prize 2018

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Extracts

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

All you need to know about the 3 Vintage titles on the shortlist

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All you need to know about the VINTAGE books on the Man Booker shortlist

The Mars Room

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 
 
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
From the author of internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers – a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration. 
 
Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Her crime? The killing of her stalker. 
 
 Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside: the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson. 
 
 As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line – until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny. 
 
'Kushner is one of our most outstanding modern writers' STYLIST 
 
'More knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black]... so powerful' NEW YORK TIMES 
 
'Breathtaking' VOGUE

From the author of internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers – a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration.

It is an unforgettable novel, and leaves the reader in no doubt that Kushner is one of America’s greatest living authors.

One of the greatest novels I have read in years. Her prior novel, The Flamethrowers, was expansive and thrilling, but this is richer and deeper, more ambitious in its moral vision… an exhilarating, always surprising read.

When I finished reading The Mars Room, I immediately reread it because I didn’t want to leave its world… The Mars Room teems with quick and distinctive voices.

Cements [Kushner's] status as one of America's finest writers.

I’ve been bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room [about life in a women’s prison]. It’s astounding – very difficult to read but so beautifully done, and with such knowledge, although it doesn’t feel like a “researched” book.

If you haven’t heard of Rachel Kushner yet, you soon will. The American novelist has earned comparisons to Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Franzen… [The Mars Room] makes for a compelling read. Imagine a darker version of "Orange Is The New Black".

[A] grainy and persuasive novel... This is a brooding book, one that dwells on Dostoyevskian notions of innocence and evil. It moves like a muscle car, oozing down the side roads of your mind.

New York Times **Critics' Top Books of 2018**

Kushner, a two-time National Book Award finalist, slowly and deliciously unfolds the tapestry of Romy’s backstory – infusing mystery and humor in unlikely places – while interrogating the harsh realities of the U.S. prison system.

Time Magazine **The Best of Culture 2018**

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room shows what happens when a smart writer gets truly serious. It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year’s must read.

It's her best book yet, another big step forward.

Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled.

This unflinching and immersive portrait of prison life is a worthy follow-up to The Flamethrowers… Kushner’s prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark… [The Mars Room] marks you like a tattoo.

A jail novel every bit as brutal as those of Edward Bunker or Stephen King… The prose is beautifully composed and the narrative never goes where you expect it. Kushner thinks herself startlingly well into the minds of warped men. The ending is stunning.

A portrait of contemporary America from one of the literary world's most exciting emerging writers.

Manages to be a novel with its own worldview and its own textures, as much as a chronicle of a system that holds more prisoners per head of population than any other country in the world.

Ambitious, astute, serious and profound, The Mars Room catapults Kushner into the American major league, along with Jonathan Franzen, Annie Proulx and Joyce Carol Oates.

Both more blackly comic and more knowing about prison life [than “Orange Is The New Black”]… It’s one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart… so powerful.

Kushner is a young master. I honestly don’t know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way.

Kushner is going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we’ll be needing in hard times to come. She is a novelist of the very first order.

Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with… authentic hyper-detail… She succeeds beautifully.

You sense early in this novel that you’re entering Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson and Charles Bukowski territory… Kushner offers a great, subversive portrait of… life inside the women’s prison… grainy and persuasive.

Urgent, terrifying and fascinating... Told with unswerving precision... Kushner is one of our most outstanding modern writers.

[Kushner] uses the novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking... Like [Don DeLillo], she is good at conjuring mayhem.

The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner's masterly new novel, infiltrates a California prison and the American criminal-justice system with breathtaking intimacy and propulsion.

The Mars Room is so sensually convincing it leaves its imprint of steel mesh on your forehead, while its compassion embraces baby-killer and brutal cop alike in the merciless confines of the American justice system. An extraordinary literary achievement.

The Mars Room is uniquely informed ... empathetic. An addictive novel, laced throughout with bracing intelligence.

I had to brace myself as I did for Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life ... An unforgettable portrait of a life lived on the margins in contemporary America.

The Mars Room offers a rare combination of admirably sure-footed sentences and a character and plot that made me stay up far too late. Romy’s situation is unbearable, and almost unbearably realised, but the writing is so very good and the ideas so expertly handled that it’s a great pleasure to read in all its devastation.

Written with the absorbing specificity and scope that have established Kushner as one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists in the country... A novel of great urgency and devastation.

The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful -- from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back.

In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity… This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large… Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner’s dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free.

Heartbreaking and unforgettable… [The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written.

Any book by literary darling Rachel Kushner will be highly anticipated, and The Mars Room is no exception... a bleak, affecting read.

A searing look at life on the margins… This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch… gripping.

Stunning… The Mars Room follows a woman, separated from her young son, who is serving two consecutive life sentences in a women’s correctional facility in California. A gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison.

Utterly convincing… the fictions [Kushner] creates have the certainty of fact.

Kushner is a masterful world-creator, and her accomplishment here is unparalleled.

Kushner’s great gift is for the evocation of a scene, a time and place, and the atmosphere.

The Mars Room is the darkly comic, tragically poignant tale of a stripper turned convict and the life that awaits her behind bars.

Kushner creates immersive histories of frayed lives from the criminal demi-monde.

While Rachel Kushner's latest book doesn't pull any punches, her prose is so witty and surreal that I couldn't help tearing through... I loved it.

Spiked with gallows humour from Romy's cell mates, [The Mars Room] is a seamy snapshot of life behind bars, served with a full-throated gusto.

Placing culturally marginalised voices centre stage to explode open a world many of us know little about... [The Mars Room] left me in tears.

The charm and wit of the incarcerated people in The Mars Room shines in Kushner's prose

A mysterious portrait of contemporary America and life on its margins... for fans of "Orange Is The New Black".

A very compelling read… hilarious and depressing and rage-inducing in equal measures.

Lyrical, bleakly comic and, ultimately, intensely affecting

It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year’s must read

Rachel Kushner’s exhaustive research into what goes on within these walls

Kushner’s high-definition, high-impact prose is as electrifying as it is daring

The momentum of the novel resides in its prose, the spring and sass of a voice so vivid it can largely dispense with the mechanics of plot

A salty and hilarious novel from one of America's best living novelists.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room should be a favourite [to win the Man Booker Prize]. If you like your escapism as gritty as it gets, prepare to be hooked by this unflinching account of a female prisoner serving a double life sentence... The Mars Room is rarely easy reading, but the furore of voices and violence and injustice throws you right into the story and keeps you immersed there.

Kushner’s novel is a timely reminder that a country’s authoritarian tendencies can be most easily measured by the number of people it deems unworthy of freedom

Rachel Kushner knows how to sniff out a good character.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room immerses you in the life of a high-security women’s prison in California, its central character Romy – accused of killing her stalker – both gritty and fragile. This was not a subject I thought would grip me, but in Kushner’s firm hands I was entranced. Much of the book is autobiographical – while never in prison herself, Kushner was the daughter of Beatniks and allowed to roam the dodgier areas of San Francisco as a teenager. The characters range from bullet-headed killers to a well-meaning male teacher whose ambiguities are brilliantly done. Romy’s trans friend Conan, “shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard”, is delightfully free of the politically correct, while the style veers excitingly from straight narrative to scribbled lists like whimpers of despair.

Times Literary Supplement **Books of the Year 2018**

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room was a hot favourite on this year's Booker shortlist, and it's easy to see why… Kushner's atmospheric writing is compelling to the last.

Irish Independent, *The best reads of 2018: Our critics name their top picks*

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose

Rachel Kushner is the author of The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her previous novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, were both New York Times bestsellers and finalists for the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

Telex from Cuba

FROM THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE MARS ROOM 
 
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER 
 
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION 
 
Fidel and Raúl Castro are in the hills, descending only to burn sugarcane plantations and recruit rebels. 
 
Rachel K is in Havana's Cabaret Tokio, entangled with a French agitator trying to escape his shameful past. 
 
Everly and K.C. are growing up in the dying days of a crumbling US colony, about to discover the cruelty and violence that have created their childhood idyll.

The New York Times bestselling debut novel by the author of the Folio Prize shortlisted The Flamethrowers

Rachel Kushner’s debut novel is an absolute blinder... Like the sea which surrounds Cuba, Telex From Cuba is ever-shifting, and it is luminous

If you relish glittering language that pursues emotional and political truth, you'll be enthralled by Telex from Cuba... the atmosphere seethes and crackles... [a] lush, intoxicating book

Telex from Cuba is epic and enjoyable: the style is lush and precise; the parties and cookouts, the drinks and affairs are beautiful and poignant, full of the pleasures of wealth overshadowed by loss.

Fascinating and vividly detailed... You can almost feel the heat radiating from the page: the air is mosquito-thick and tainted with a nickel oxide haze, the tropical landscape a character in its own right

A piece of fiction quite breathtaking in its assurance […] a beautifully weighted treatise on colonial attitudes, capitalism, racism and the interactions and divisions between cultures and classes

A lush, meticulous, cinematic debut novel

Kushner evokes a dreamlike paradise... A poignant tale

[Kushner's] cleverly counterposed registers and nuanced explanation of the way we make and remake ourselves elevates her book beyond the standard historical romp

Deeply evocative... A fascinating and vividly detailed portrait of the country

An intriguing, multifaceted portrait of a society in flux

Massively compelling… Tough yet tender writing that throbs with history, nostalgia and love

Telex from Cuba is a wonderful debut and essential reading for those who wish to follow the career of one of the best new writers of our generation

[Telex From Cuba] proves that this American author is a superstar of the future

An epic, almost cinematic sweep of a vanished time and place

A pure treat from the cover to the very last page

Mutli-layered and absorbing... Kushner's style is sure and sharp, studded with illuminating images... Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume

Fresh and compelling. Kushner takes us to a place and time we've seldom visited before

A stunner of a novel... A fluid, eye-opening symphony of a book

With its sharp detail and precisely drawn characters, Telex from Cuba offers a compelling look at a paradise corrupted

Telex from Cuba elegantly weaves together a gripping story of individuals and their lives leading up to one of the most notorious revolutions of the twentieth century

The Flamethrowers

FROM THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE MARS ROOM 
 
SHORTLISTED FOR THE FOLIO PRIZE 2014 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 
 
Reno mounts her motorcycle and sets a collision course for New York. 
 
In 1977 the city is alive with art, sensuality and danger. She falls in with a bohemian clique colonising downtown and the lines between reality and performance begin to bleed. 
 
A passionate affair with the scion of an Italian tyre empire carries Reno to Milan, where she is swept along by the radical left and drawn into a spiral of violence and betrayal. 
 
The Flamethrowers is an audacious novel that explores the perplexing allure of femininity, fakery and fear. In Reno we encounter a heroine like no other. 
 
Best Books of the Year: 
* Guardian * New York Times * The Times * Observer * Financial Times * New Yorker * Telegraph * Slate * Oprah * Vogue * Time * Scotsman * Evening Standard * 
 
Shortlisted for the National Book Awards 2013

An extraordinarily ambitious big American novel about a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s - by turns underground, elite, dangerous

Scintillatingly alive... It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures

Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist

One of the most thrilling and high-octane literary experiences I have had in ages

It's so good, it's a little frightening… it makes any fretting over the state of the novel look plain silly

An adrenalin-fuelled coming-of-age novel

Unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember

An ambitious and serious American novel. The sentences are sharp and gorgeously made. The scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace

Dazzling... The Flamethrowers is a virtuoso performance; a ride of ache and pleasure, handled with pinpoint command

This glittering novel is both carefully structured and exhilarating

Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground

The Flamethrowers is a strange, fascinating beast of a novel, brimming with ideas, and sustained by the muscular propulsion of Kushner’s prose… Kushner emerges as a wildly gifted artist filling a sketchbook with thrilling, eye-catching scenes

There is an exhilarating freedom to Kushner’s writing… Taut, vividly intelligent prose

Sparky and inventive...a riot of a novel

Ms Kushner’s kaleidoscopic prose carries the novel’s shifts in location and person, and the fast-paced rhythm harnesses the thrill of adventure

Oscillating between the hedonistic New York art world and Italy in the midst of the Years of Lead, The Flamethrowers is that rare thing, a novel that uses recent history not as a picturesque backdrop but as a way of interrogating the present. Kushner's urgent prose and psychological acuity make this one of the most compelling and enjoyable novels I've read this year

The controlled intensity and perception in Rachel Kushner's novels mark her as one of the most brilliant writers of the new century. She's going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. Rachel Kushner is a novelist of the very first order. The Flamethrowers follows Telex from Cuba as a masterful work

The Flamethrowers lives up to its incendiary title – it is a brilliant, startling truly revolutionary book about the New York art world of the seventies, Italian class warfare, and youth's blind acceleration into the unknown. Kushner is a genius prose stylist, and her Reno is one of the most fully realized protagonists I've ever encountered, moving fluidly from the fringe of the fringe movement to the center of the action. I want to recommend this stunning book to everyone I know

Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel.

Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia

A high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit... Hang on: this is a trip you don’t want to miss

Wow! What a book! I'm eager for everyone I know to read it. It's an example of the very best in contemporary fiction…a contemporary masterpiece, and it wants you all to read it

A dazzlingly exciting novel... This is a deeply intelligent and engaging novel that uses all the virtues of old-fashioned storytelling to celebrate the triumphs and absurdities of new-fangled art

The Flamethrowers has gained praise from Jonathan Franzen and drawn comparisons with Patti Smith's Just Kids as it epically leaps between the New York art scene of the late 1970s and Italy in the midst of revolution... An essential summer read

Exhilirating, psychologically complex, and perfectly intense, this is a thrilling contemporary novel likely to become a cultural touchstone

A brilliant lightning bolt of a novel

In this extremely bold, swashbuckling novel, romantic and disillusioned at once, intellectually daring and even subversive, Rachel Kushner has created the most beguiling American ingénue abroad, well, maybe ever: Daisy Miller as a sharply observant yet vulnerable Reno-raised motorcycle racer and aspiring artist, set loose in gritty 70s New York and the Italy of the Red Brigades

Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name

Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers is remarkable for its expansiveness and for its exhilarating succession of ideas

National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner brings NYC's art scene to life so well in The Flamethrowers you could get high off the paint

Electric...addictive...smart and satisfying

This is a work of ferocious energy and imaginative verve, straining at the seams with ideas, riffs, jokes, set-pieces, belly-laughs, horror and heartbreak

Kushner writes with authority, passion and humour, her characters richly drawn and her story packed with delicious anecdotes and side lines from a wide array of memorable characters

Kushner's second  novel comes loaded with recommendations and it's easy to see why…highly  unusual and written with great seriousness and potency

It manages to relate the art scene in 1970s New York to the Red Brigades in Italy, with lots of motorbikes thrown in

This novel has undeniable force and power… it’s beautifully written

You can feel the wind whipping through your hair, your pulse racing, as Kushner’s daring heroine, Reno, motorcycles across salt flats and down city streets, on the prowl for art, for love, for a cause

Kushner’s take on 1970s radicalism, art and politics is a big, absorbing read

A self-consciously cool mash-up  of motorbikes, art and unpleasant Italian politics

In fiction I enjoyed Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers for its style and its daring

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner manages to connect the art scene in New York in the 1970s with the Red Brigades in Italy, through the medium of motorcycles and drag car racing. Ambitious and beautifully written, it is one of the more surprising books I have read this year

A left-field and potentially ludicrous literary concept – a multigenerational transcontinental historical epic built around a speed-freak biker heroine – is executed with élan by American novelist Rachel Kushner … Genius

The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces

A Bildungsroman set against the violence of the 20th century, The Flamethrowers is less a litmus test for misogyny than a standard for the recent historical novel

It should've won the National Book Award... It is second to none

Some of the prose is as thrilling as riding a motorbike on a mountain road with no lights

Has the kind of poise, wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone or Joan Didion

For a while last spring it seemed like every single person I knew in New York was reading The Flamethrowers, which is normally enough to put me off a book, but in this case I did read it and found that its ubiquity was more than justified. Then in September I happened to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where one of its most memorable set-pieces takes place, and I wanted to read it all over again. If I say it captures a young woman's experience of the downtown art world in the 1970s, I'm going to make it sound boring, but in fact it's superbly enjoyable

Much of what makes this book so magnificent is Kushner's astonishing observational powers; she seems to work with a muse and a nail gun, so surprisingly yet forcefully do her sentences pin reality to the page. I was pinned there too –– BEST BOOK OF 2013

A terrific, gripping, poetic book... Kushner's meandering plot and pacy pose has completely won me over

Kushner’s prose dazzles with invention

Rachel Kushner

Essays 2000–2020

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. 
 
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction. 
 
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. 
 
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing 
 
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue 
 
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year

Rachel Kushner

The Hard Crowd

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