Rachel Kushner

From celebrated writer Rachel Kushner comes a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays encompassing politics, culture, and art. Since her debut more than a decade ago, Rachel Kushner has firmly established herself as not only one of our finest fiction writers, but one of our most incisive essayists--each of her pieces is singular, brilliant, and itself a literary event. Now, in The Hard Crowd, Kushner gathers a selection of her writing over the course of the last twenty years that not only illuminates the themes that underpin her fiction, but addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times. In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on politics, social justice, and her personal relationships, as well as on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp in East Jerusalem, the world of truckers, and the music scene of her hometown of San Francisco. Her stories are electric, incisive, and wry, and provide us the opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.

En bladvändare, av den otäckare sorten, och den kryper tätt inpå. Vi-LäserGastkramande, och djupt trovärdig. M-MagasinBlixtsnabba iakttagelser i koncentrat, av en värld som inte borde få finnas. Dagens NyheterSå briljant och övertygande skriven att man tror att den är en dokumentär. AftonbladetAlldeles ljuvlig, en bladvändare som får dig att glömma allt utom läsningen. Skånska DagbladetEn brutalt bra bok. TaraGripande berättelse om en ung kvinna som aldrig fick en ärlig chans. Damernas världTHE MARS ROOM är namnet på strippklubben där Romy arbetade för att försörja sig, och där mannen hon dödat gjorde henne till sin. Nu avtjänar hon dubbla livstidsstraff på en högsäkerhetsanstalt. Det är en hård, sjuk och skitig tillvaro men ännu hårdare är att hon inte får träffa sin son, som hon förlorat vårdnaden om för att ha försökt skydda. Med osentimental skärpa och dräpande humor skildrar Rachel Kushner makt och vanmakt på ett sätt som får Romy och personerna som flankerar hennes liv att krypa under huden. Tillsammans med inslag ur Unabombarens perspektiv blir det en svidande kommentar till hur samhället skapar sina skyldiga. THE MARS ROOM valdes till årets bästa bok i TIME Magazine, samt var Man Booker-finalist och Andrew Carnegie-nominerad Hårdkokt, empatiskt och fingertoppskänsligt levererar den käftsmällar som känns rakt igenom äkta. Margaret Atwood Det här är på riktigt. Omskakande, fruktansvärt, passionerat och roligt. Stephen King En av de bästa böcker jag läst om vår tids USA. Karl Ove KnausgårdRACHEL KUSHNER är en av sin generations mest kända och originella författare. Hon skriver med absolut gehör för den verkliga världen. The Mars Room är ett lika realistiskt som skrämmande porträtt av fängelser och det så kallade rättssystemet i Kalifornien, där boken nu är officiellt bannlyst. Båda hennes föregående romaner (Telex from Cuba och Eldkastarna) var bästsäljare och finalister i National Book Award. Med The Mars Room har hon dessutom blivit Man Booker-finalist, nominerats till en Andrew Carnegie-medalj och Goodreads Choice Awards, samt kommit till final i National Book Critics Circle och vunnit det franska Prix Médicis étranger. Hennes romaner har översatts till 24 språk och hon har publicerats i New York Times, Harpers, New Yorker och Paris Review. Hon är bosatt i Los Angeles.

Romy Hall soner to livstidsdommer for å ha drept en mann som forfulgte og plaget henne. På innsiden av murene er dagene endeløse, fylt av meningsløse gjøremål. Det er de fargerike personlighetene blant de innsatte – og historiene de forteller - som gjør hverdagen levelig. De snakker med hverandre gjennom kloakkrørene og drikker sprit framstilt i noens gamle sokker. På utsiden av murene har Romy minner fra en tøff oppvekst i San Francisco og fra den tiden hun jobbet på strippebula Mars-salongen. Men det mest verdifulle hun har, er den sju år gamle sønnen Jackson som bor hos moren hennes. Da moren dør, blir sønnen tatt hånd om av myndighetene, og Romy blir desperat etter å hjelpe ham. Mars-salongen forteller en rystende historie om livet i fengsel - om volden og meningsløsheten, men også om samholdet og latteren. Rachel Kushner skildrer mesterlig hvor absurd institusjonslivet kan være – og hvor smertelig det er å kjempe en kamp man er nødt til å tape.«Kushner er en våre mest femragende moderne forfattere» Stylist«Mer kunnskapsrik om fengselslivet enn Orange Is The New Black … Mektig!» New York Times«Til å miste pusten av.» Vogue«Modig, empatisk, skarpt skildret» Margaret Atwood«En pageturner … en sånn bok som gjør deg rasende samtidig som den knuser hjertet ditt.» The New York Times Book Review«Briljant og knusende … en hjerteskjærende, sannferdig og nesten feilfri roman.» NPR«Med sin sammensatte tredje roman befester Kushner sin plass som en av de store amerikanske forfatterne i det tjueførste århundret.» Entertainment Weekly

The only collection of Rattray's prose: essays that offer a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition. In order to become one of the invisible, it is necessary to throw oneself into the arms of God... Some of us stayed for weeks, some for months, some forever.—from How I Became One of the InvisibleSince its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to a poetic and mystical tradition running through Western civilization from Pythagoras to In Nomine music to Hölderlin and Antonin Artaud. Rattray not only excavated this tradition, he embodied and lived it. He studied at Harvard and the Sorbonne but remained a poet, outside the academy. His stories “Van” and “The Angel” chronicle his travels in southern Mexico with his friend, the poet Van Buskirk, and his adventures after graduating from Dartmouth in the mid-1950s. Eclipsed by the more mediagenic Beat writers during his lifetime, Rattray has become a powerful influence on contemporary artists and writers. Living in Paris, Rattray became the first English translator of Antonin Artaud, and he understood Artaud's incisive scholarship and technological prophecies as few others would. As he writes of his translations in How I Became One of the Invisible, “You have to identify with the man or the woman. If you don't, then you shouldn't be translating it. Why would you translate something that you didn't think had an important message for other people? I translated Artaud because I wanted to turn my friends on and pass a message that had relevance to our lives. Not to get a grant, or be hired by an English department.” Compiled in the months before his untimely death at age 57, How I Became One of the Invisible is the only volume of Rattray's prose. This new edition, edited by Robert Dewhurst, includes five additional pieces, two of them previously unpublished.

Årets bästa bok enligt TIME, samt Man Booker-finalist och Andrew Carnegie-nomineradDet här är en bladvändare, av den otäckare sorten, och den kryper tätt inpå både fängelselivet och sin läsare. Vi-LäserGastkramande, och djupt trovärdig. M-MagasinBlixtsnabba iakttagelser i koncentrat, av en värld som inte borde få finnas. Dagens NyheterSå briljant och övertygande skriven att man tror att den är en dokumentär. AftonbladetEn tung bok med ett tungt budskap. Samtidigt är den alldeles ljuvlig, en bladvändare som får dig att glömma allt utom läsningen. Skånska DagbladetEn brutalt bra bok. TaraGripande berättelse om en ung kvinna som aldrig fick en ärlig chans till ett bra liv. Damernas värld THE MARS ROOM är namnet på strippklubben där Romy arbetade för att försörja sig, och där mannen hon dödat gjorde henne till sin. Nu avtjänar hon dubbla livstidsstraff på en högsäkerhetsanstalt. Det är en hård, sjuk och skitig tillvaro men ännu hårdare är att hon inte får träffa sin son, som hon förlorat vårdnaden om för att ha försökt skydda. Med osentimental skärpa och dräpande humor skildrar Rachel Kushner makt och vanmakt på ett sätt som får Romy och personerna som flankerar hennes liv att krypa under huden. Tillsammans med inslag ur Unabombarens perspektiv blir det en svidande kommentar till hur samhället skapar sina skyldiga. Hårdkokt, empatiskt och fingertoppskänsligt levererar den käftsmällar som känns rakt igenom äkta. Margaret Atwood Det här är på riktigt. Omskakande, fruktansvärt, passionerat och roligt. Stephen King En av de bästa böcker jag läst om vår tids USA. Karl Ove Knausgård RACHEL KUSHNER är en av sin generations mest kända och originella författare. Hon skriver med absolut gehör för den verkliga världen. The Mars Room är ett lika realistiskt som skrämmande porträtt av fängelser och det så kallade rättvisesystemet i Kalifornien, där boken nu är officiellt bannlyst. Båda hennes föregående romaner (Telex from Cuba och Eldkastarna) var bästsäljare och finalister i National Book Award. Med The Mars Room har hon dessutom blivit Man Booker-finalist, nominerats till en Andrew Carnegie-medalj och Goodreads Choice Awards, samt kommit till final i National Book Critics Circle och vunnit det franska Prix Médicis étranger. Hennes romaner har översatts till 24 språk och hon har publicerats i New York Times, Harper s, New Yorker och Paris Review. Hon är bosatt i Los Angeles.

"If Debussy and Robert Walser had collaborated on an opera, it would sound like this."-John Ashbery "The mad genius of Pale Fire with the florid outlaw sexuality of Jean Genet"-Kirkus ReviewsFor five years, concert pianist Theo Mangrove has been living at his family's home in East Kill, New York, recovering from a nervous breakdown that derailed his career, and attempting to relieve his relentless polysexual appetite in the company of male hustlers, random strangers, music students, his aunt, and occasionally his wife. As he prepares for a comeback recital in Aigues-Mortes, a walled medieval town in southern France, he becomes obsessed with the idea that the Italian circus star Moira Orfei must join him there to perform alongside him. Extravagantly (and tragicomically) describing his hallucinatory plans in a series of twenty-five notebooks, he assembles an incantatory meditation on performance, failure, fame, decay, and delusion. A new edition of a "dazzlingly seductive" fever dream written in "brilliant poetic vernacular" (Bookforum) by a beloved poet and cultural critic, now with an introduction by Rachel Kushner.

TIME'S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An i

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.

The three pieces gathered in The Strange Case of Rachel K roughly map the genesis of Rachel Kushner's fiction. From the fate of a conquistador in "The Great Exception," to the illegal radio broadcasts and then bombs in "Debouchment," to a Havana courtesan's "strange" case, these stories build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful. In this collection, which "overflows in atmosphere as it shows off the burgeoning talent of one of our best writers" (NPR), Rachel Kushner is forging her own original path into the wilds of contemporary fiction.

An explorer s whereabouts keeps a queen in waiting; a faith healer s illegal radio broadcasts give hope to an oppressed people; a president s offer of ice cream surprises a prostitute expecting to cooperate fully the three short fictions gathered in The Great Exception build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful. Written prior to the publication of Rachel Kushner s first acclaimed novel Telex From Cuba, these stories, like Roberto Bolano s Antwerp, burst forth with the genesis of her fictional universe as though fired from a cannon. From the mythical title story, to the ominous Debouchment originally published in her too short-lived journal Soft Targets to the sexy and noirish Strange Case of Rachel K, this is Kushner saddling up for a journey into the wilds of the modern novel."

FROM THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF THE MARS ROOMA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERFINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTIONFidel and Raúl Castro are in the hills, descending only to burn sugarcane plantations and recruit rebels.

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

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine's #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker; Time; Flavorwire; Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast"Superb... Scintillatingly alive... A pure explosion of now."--The New Yorker Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity--artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts--by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction The debut novel by New York Times bestselling author Rachel Kushner, called "shimmering" (The New Yorker), "multilayered and absorbing" (The New York Times Book Review), and "gorgeously written" (Kirkus Reviews). Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom--three hundred thousand acres of United Fruit Company sugarcane that surround their gated enclave. If the rural tropics are a child's dreamworld, Everly and K. C. nevertheless have keen eyes for the indulgences and betrayals of the grown-ups around them--the mordant drinking and illicit loves, the race hierarchies and violence. In Havana, a thousand kilometers and a world away from the American colony, a cabaret dancer meets a French agitator named Christian de La Mazi re, whose seductive demeanor can't mask his shameful past. Together they become enmeshed in the brewing political underground. When Fidel and Ra l Castro lead a revolt from the mountains above the cane plantation, torching the sugar and kidnapping a boat full of "yanqui" revelers, K. C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony humming. Though their parents remain blissfully untouched by the forces of history, the children hear the whispers of what is to come. Kushner's first novel is a tour de force, haunting and compelling, with the urgency of a telex from a forgotten time and place.

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture. Rachel Kushner is a writer celebrated for her ’chops, ambition, and killer instinct’ (John Powers, Fresh Air). In The Hard Crowd, she 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 nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing. These pieces, new and old, are electric, phosphorescently vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of the world’s most dazzling and fearless writers.