Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is among America’s most exciting writers. She is a participant observer with a mind-bending range. Her novels explore big ideas and themes, from the Cuban revolution, to art, speed, modernism and revolutionary politics, to contemporary California and homicide and prison, to her next, about an undercover agent spying on a commune of anarchists in contemporary France.

Rachel was a finalist for the Booker Prize and the NBCC in fiction, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award, was awarded the Harold D Vursell award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, and Harper’s, where she is a regular columnist. Rachel’s first novel, Telex from Cuba, intertwines revolution in 1950’s Cuba and visceral human interactions with a revelatory, deft hand. A New York Times bestseller and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, it was also a winner of the California Book Award.

Her incendiary work, The Flamethrowers, is celebrated as a modern classic. It was a finalist for The National Book Award and was named one of the Top Ten Books of the year by the New York Times. In their review the New York Times proclaimed, “…her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of wearysouled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.”

Rachel’s novel, The Mars Room, Booker Prize finalist, NBCC finalist, and winner of the Prix Médici, a National Book Foundation Literature for Justice Award and a California Book Award, is an intense, unforgettable, and heartbreaking story set in a California women’s prison. The novel delivers a necessary critique of the judicial system as well as an attack on the prison industrial complex. Rachel crafts a holistic depiction of who gets wrapped up in incarceration – families, lawyers, police, and prisoners, written with a skilled voice that is filled with pathos, love, and humanity. Her latest collection, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, was published in 2021 and hailed as a “…testimony to the breadth both of Kushner’s experience and of her intellectual convictions… gallant and moving…” by The New York Times Book Review. “It’s a wary voice,” as Dwight Garner put it, in his review, “cool and wise, with real power and control.” Rachel’s new novel, Creation Lake, will be out in September 2024.