The Hard Crowd (Unabridged)
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4.2 • 6 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
AUDIO EXCLUSIVE: INCLUDES GALAXIE 500’S SONG “ANOTHER DAY!”
“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” —Taylor Antrim, Vogue
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. 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 experiences that inform 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, 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 in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.”
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Rachel Kushner is one of the most compelling novelists of our time, and her first book of essays makes her sound like she’s also exciting to hang with. Seriously: The essay about the time she participated in an illegal, deadly motorcycle race along Mexico’s Baja California peninsula makes us just want to sit and listen to her life story. But at its heart, The Hard Crowd is about Kushner’s captivating relationship with art and culture. She talks about tending bar at San Francisco rock clubs and about her favorite writers, such as Denis Johnson and Clarice Lispector. Then she goes deep on the research she did about the ’70s New York art scene and left-wing Italian youth politics for her breakthrough novel, The Flamethrowers. All of this climaxes in the epic autobiographical title essay, which rivals Joan Didion for how it raises as many questions as it answers. Kushner reads these 19 essays in a matter-of-fact style that emphasizes her wonderfully wry sense of humor. Hearing The Hard Crowd will inspire you to engage with art in a new way—and hopefully not to drive 130 mph down a dirt highway.
Customer Reviews
Name dropper..show stopper. Little girl lost.
I get the advantage of dropping a name here or there to force the notion of some strange elitism, but the level to which it happens in this book is exhausting. This book is the result of a child whose grown up in body only. A sad example of how the parents neglect of a child can rob them so quickly of their innocence. Reading between the lines of this book is what breaks your heart.