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2021 | Essays
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.
Rachel Kushner
(Author)
| Published by | Jonathan Cape |
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The opening essay about Kushner’s participation in an illegal motorbike race on the Baja Peninsula was probably my favourite - it sounded terrifying and exciting all at once. She does seem to like anything to do with motors, as a later essay showed. This one wasn’t really for me, but this is a collection where there is something for everyone. The chapter on wild cat strikes was interesting, as were the ones where she describes her formative years in her hometown and the music concerts she went to (loved these too). The last essay in the book played out as though it was on a film in my head.
The essay about prison reform was really thought provoking, as was that of when Kushner visited a Palestinian refugee camp. I could easily have read more of this one - no matter how saddening it ultimately was.
Rachel Kushner really can write. As she did in The Mars Room, each of these essays really evoked a time and place and made this book pretty hard to put down.
Many thanks to Jonathan Cape for inviting me to read this via NetGalley.