The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner
The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner
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The Hard Crowd
Essays 2000-2020

Author: Rachel Kushner

Narrator: Rachel Kushner

Unabridged: 7 hr 52 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/06/2021

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included


Synopsis

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.”

About Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; 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 Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. 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 have been translated into twenty-seven languages.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kasa on February 25, 2023

In a recent Zoom conversation between George Saunders and Tobias Wolfe, Rachel Kushner's name came up -- Saunders said he would read whatever she wrote. She is one of those special talents who is equally at home in fiction as well as non-, and this collection of essays showcases her proficiency with......more

Goodreads review by Sunny on December 01, 2022

Do you ever read something and get mad that you’ll never be as interesting of a person or as good of a writer or as smart of a woman as the author of the book you just read......more

Goodreads review by W.D. on July 06, 2021

It seems that of the essays by author-critics that I've been reading over the past while, some of the very best have been by women: Zadie Smith's two volumes (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Feel Free: Essays) and Joan Didion's The White Album both seldom failed to charm, enlighten and entertai......more


Quotes

"Rachel Kushner narrates these essays precisely and warmly. Her voice, assured and practiced, moves the text along. An admired novelist, she's a fine storyteller who uses pace well. She gives life to the many real-life characters—artists, writers, activists, daredevils—who fill this audiobook."