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

About the Author
Rachel Kushner is the author of The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Medicis and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.

Reviews
The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout. * Vogue *
One of America's most exciting writers . . . A brilliant collection of art and literary criticism, reportage, and autobiography. * Daily Telegraph *
She writes as well as any writer alive about the pleasure of a good motor doing what it was designed to do . . . Cool and wise, with real power and control . . . This book has a real gallery of souls . . . As strong a statement about artistic purpose and sensibility as I've read in a while. -- Dwight Garner * New York Times *
She seems to work with a muse and a nail gun, so surprisingly yet forcefully do her sentences pin reality to the page. -- Kathryn Schulz * New York Magazine *
I honestly don't know how she is able to know so much (about motorcycle racing, Italian radical politics) and convey all of it in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way. -- George Saunders



Book Information
ISBN 9781529114027
Author Rachel Kushner
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 235g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 128mm * 19mm