"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."
