The Hard Crowd
Essays 2000–2020
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Character sketches and nostalgic detail pepper this wide-ranging essay collection from Kushner (The Mars Room). Blending criticism with memoir, Kushner tackles such subjects as abolitionism and the Bay Area's biker scene in the 1980s. "Girl on a Motorcycle" and "Not with the Band" trace the author's exposure to "hard" lifestyles, including surviving a high-speed motorcycle crash in Mexico and, while working as a bartender in San Francisco, realizing that mere proximity to rock fame would never satisfy her own creative ambition. "We Are Orphans Here" is a striking account of both the violence and the vitality of Shuafat Refugee Camp, where Palestinians live as "refugees in their own city." "Lipstick Traces" and "Duras with an S" bring the work of Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras to life with vivid biographical details (Lispector had "a sense of humor that veered from na f wonder to wicked comedy"), while "Made to Burn" and "Bunny" offer glimpses into the genesis of Kushner's 2013 novel The Flamethrowers. The memoir essays sometimes settle for simple nostalgia rather than arriving at a revelation, a dilemma Kushner seems aware of: "The things that I've seen and the people I've known: maybe it just can't matter to you." Still, the author's fans will enjoy these insights into her evolution as a writer.
