The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020

Book Title: Hard Crowd (Us Exp)/T
ISBN: 9781982173005
By Author(s):RACHEL KUSHNER
By Publisher:SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:TPB

From a writer celebrated for her chops, ambition, and killer instinct (John Powers,Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.

Rachel Kushner has established herself as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today (The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. InThe 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 timesand illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.

In nineteen razor-sharp essays,The Hard Crowdspans 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, vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor, said Leah Greenblatt inEntertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in theWall Street Journal: The authority and precision of Kushners writing is impressive, but its the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.