Rachel Kushner

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RACHEL KUSHNER “One of the most brilliant Writers of the new century.” —Robert Stone Rachel Kushner is among America’s most exciting writers. Her novels and essays explore contemporary art, culture, revolutionary politics, modernism, and feminism with unmatched wisdom and grace. She has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her fiction and essays appear regularly in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, and Grand Street. Rachel’s first novel, Telex from Cuba, intertwines revolution in 1950’s Cuba and visceral human interactions with a revelatory, deft hand. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it “Soundly researched and gorgeously written.” 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, 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. It is celebrated as a modern classic. Rachel’s work continues to garner acclaim among her contemporaries like few other authors in recent history. In their review The New York Times proclaimed, “…her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.” Rachel’s latest, The Mars Room, 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. The New York Times calls The Mars Room, “A major novel, a sustained performance, one that broods on several exigent ideas.” 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. Rachel will publish her new collection, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, in 2021. 404 East College Street, Suite 408 · Iowa City Iowa · 52240 office 319- 338-7080 · [email protected] · tuesdayagency.com.

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Cuba: a Reading List
Cuba: A Reading List “Before Night Falls” by Reinaldo Arenas Mr. Arenas was persecuted in Cuba for his writings and for being gay, and eventually fled to the United States. He committed suicide in New York in 1990, at 47. “Before Night Falls,” his autobiography, was later made into a film starring Javier Bardem. In The New York Times Book Review, Roberto González Echevarría wrote: “Anyone who feels the temptation to be lenient in judging Castro’s government should first read this passionate and beautifully written book.” “Dreaming in Cuban” by Cristina García Ms. García’s first novel tells the story of three generations of women in one family, and how staying in Cuba or fleeing the country affects their lives. Reviewing the book in The Times, Michiko Kakutani said that Ms. García had “produced a work that possesses both the intimacy of a Chekhov story and the hallucinatory magic of a novel by Gabriel García Márquez.” “Paradiso” by José Lezama Lima This novel by Mr. Lima, a major Cuban poet, is about a boy’s coming of age and his search for his dead father. In the Book Review, Edmund White wrote that Mr. Lima “not only has the power to create absorbing and memorable images, he has also placed these images into a vast network of philosophical and mythical significance.” “Three Trapped Tigers” by Guillermo Cabrera Infante In the Book Review, Charles Wilson wrote that Mr. Infante’s most celebrated novel “borrows from the playfulness and form of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Finnegans Wake’ as it describes the decadent life of young people who explore Havana’s cabaret society during the Batista era.” “Explosion in a Cathedral” by Alejo Carpentier Set in Cuba and elsewhere, Mr.
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Kenneth Bonert: Balancing Insight, Poetry and a Ripping Good Story
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An Interview with Rachel Kushner
★ BELIEVERMAG.COM ★ SUBSCRIBE ★ STORE ★ CURRENT ISSUE ★ Enjoy the special features below and please consider subscribing to the Believer. M AY 2 4 , 2 0 1 3 "IT’S SPELLED MOTHERFUCKERS."—AN INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL KUSHNER (Gabriele Basilico, Contact, 1984) I was surprised when my friend Rachel Kushner told me that, having just finished her final edit for her first novel, Telex for Cuba, she was excited to start work on a second novel which would be set in the New York art world of the early 1970’s. I remember being shocked that she had already figured it all out and knew where she was going next… usually, when I finish a lot of work, I just want to stay in bed and sleep for a year. And so when I heard from her sometime later that she would be travelling to Italy to do research for the novel, I just assumed she had changed her mind and decided instead to write about Italian revolutionaries. When I started reading The Flamethowers I was humbled and embarrassed to realize that I had underestimated her commitments. Set in both New York and Italy, parts of the book reminded me of social experiences in the art world so acutely I cringed with painful recognition as I read. Ten years after Rachel interviewed me for the then very new Believer, I had the pleasure of driving with her across town to Santa Monica City College where we wandered the campus looking for KCRW. Far from my Eagle Rock studio where the first conversation took place with a cassette recorder, pen and paper, we found ourselves lost looking for the underground recording studios.
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Visions of Vietnam in Women's Short Fiction Susanne Carter
Vietnam Generation Volume 1 Number 3 Gender and the War: Men, Women and Article 8 Vietnam 10-1989 Visions of Vietnam in Women's Short Fiction Susanne Carter Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Carter, Susanne (1989) "Visions of Vietnam in Women's Short Fiction," Vietnam Generation: Vol. 1 : No. 3 , Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.lasalle.edu/vietnamgeneration/vol1/iss3/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by La Salle University Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Vietnam Generation by an authorized editor of La Salle University Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. VisioNs of ViETNAM iN Women's SHort FicTioN S usanne C arter During World War II, British Writer Elizabeth Bowen recognized the short story as the “ideal prose medium for war-time creative writing.” To her it seemed the only genre “capable of conveying the immediacy of her experiences.” Both a novelist and a short story writer, Bowen discovered the “disjointed nature of wartime experience was exhilarating for the short story writer” while it “created serious impediments for the novelist who wished to portray these years in fiction.” The short story seemed better suited than the novel to capture the “fragmentary and abrupt quality of life” characteristic of wartime.1 The Vietnam war fictional writings of contemporary women authors would seem to corroborate Bowen’s assertions, for the majority of these women have elected the short story genre to express their individual interpretations of the Vietnam experience rather than the novel form, although there are noteworthy exceptions in Jayne Anne Phillips’ Machine Dreams, Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s The Healer’s War, Patricia Walsh’s Forever Sad the Hearts, and Susan Schaeffer’s Buffalo Afternoon.
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Tuesday, March 19, 2013 Garland Scott, (202) 675–0342, [email protected] Emma Snyder (202) 898-9061 [email protected]
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE PRESS CONTACTS: Tuesday, March 19, 2013 Garland Scott, (202) 675–0342, [email protected] Emma Snyder (202) 898-9061 [email protected] BENJAMIN ALIRE SÁENZ RECEIVES 2013 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION Washington, DC—Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (Cinco Puntos) has been selected as the winner of the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The announcement was made today by the directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Susan Richards Shreve and Robert Stone, Co-Chairmen. The judges—Walter Kirn, Nelly Rosario, and A.J. Verdelle—considered more than 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the U.S. during the 2012 calendar year. Submissions came from 130 publishing houses, including small and academic presses. There is no fee for a publisher or writer to submit a book. The honored book, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club presents seven stories set on the south Texas border of El Paso and Juárez, examining lives bounded by geography, politics, violence and the echoes of personal history. The titular Kentucky Club, a Juárez institution that sits four blocks from the U.S. border, provides a guiding thread for the collection, acting alternately as backdrop, touchstone, and oasis for a humane set of characters who struggle with the impossible ambiguities of borders whether they be sexual, emotional, national or economic. In the words of judge A.J. Verdelle, “In Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club, his twentieth published book, Benjamin Alire Sáenz shows how decades working at your craft gives birth to might and mastery … He presents a rendering of reality that is lush, tender, expansive, inclusive and profound.
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The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner Reno Comes to New York Intent on Turning Her Fascination with Motorcycles and Speed Into Art
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner Reno comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity – artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, and blur the line between life and art. Why you'll like it: 1970s New York, gritty, coming of age. About the Author: Rachel Kushner's New York Times bestselling novel The Flamethrowers was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and was chosen as one of the five best novels of the year by the New York Times. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Book Review and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. Kushner's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Paris Review. She is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2016 winner of the Howard D. Vursell Award for her prose style, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Amazon). Questions for discussion 1. Reno wants to create Land Art in the manner of iconic artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer. Why does she leave the West, where both of those famous figures chose to make their work, for New York City? Is the contemporary art world accessible to most people? Or is it somewhat elitist? 2.
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{TEXTBOOK} Telex from Cuba Ebook
TELEX FROM CUBA PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Rachel Kushner | 322 pages | 02 Jun 2009 | Scribner Book Company | 9781416561040 | English | New York, NY, United States Telex from Cuba PDF Book Rudy was a few notches down the chain. Yes, there's a lot of background info on characters etc, but I found the writing mundane. The degree of privilege enjoyed depends largely upon the importance of the company involved, not to the society in which it operates but rather to the government of that society which acts effectively as a business partner. These allusions shine like understated gems in the fabric of the novel. It is a powerful, haunting look at the human side of revolution. Raves and Reviews. Christmastime, she went out into the countryside on her horse with gifts and toys. Quotes from Telex from Cuba. But there was no one around. Stites, Mr. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the. Sarte makes a slightly less awkward but equally odd appearance in a fantasy as well. He drove us down the access road a ways and parked. If we liked what the model wore, Mother tried it on and came out and took a spin. Why it took me four years? Kingfisher The Hollow Places is one of those books that keeps you up at night, either because you Ambassador Smith was never in his office when Daddy needed him. Can you think of other examples of dichotomy? I was in the parlor listening to the radio, to see if I could find out what was happening in the mountains.
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The Mars Room: a Novel Rachel Kushner
The Mars Room: A Novel Rachel Kushner Discussion Questions 1. At the beginning of the book, before she is incarcerated, Romy Hall, the central protagonist of The Mars Room, says, "I said everything was fine but nothing was. The life was being sucked out of me. The problem was not moral. It had nothing to do with morality. These men dimmed my glow. Made me numb to touch, and angry" (page 26). What role do morality and virtue play in the telling of Romy’s story? Does morality factor into who is judged guilty and who is judged in- nocent? 2. The San Francisco depicted in this book is perhaps not a classic one of, as Romy puts it, "rainbow flags or Beat poetry or steep crooked streets," but "fog and Irish bars and liquor stores all the way to the Great Highway" (page 33). Was the San Francisco depicted in the novel a surprise to you? What significance do you read into the scene with the "Scummerz" and the young boy mak- ing noodles on the stove? Why is everyone from her past and all her memories so remote and vanished? Is this the nature of childhood and the erasure of cities, or something else more com- plicated and individual to do with Romy? 3. The overwhelming majority of people, and certainly middle-class people, will never spend a sin- gle day of their lives in jails and prisons. Should those who don’t have that dark destiny worry for those who do? What impression do you have, after reading The Mars Room, about individual agency, and who goes to prison in this country and who doesn’t? 4.
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DUONG THU HUONG in CONVERSATION with ROBERT STONE Sunday, April 30, 2006 South Court Auditorium NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
DUONG THU HUONG IN CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT STONE Sunday, April 30, 2006 South Court Auditorium NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY WWW.NYPL.ORG/LIVE PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: . to host these conversations in the Library. We don’t quite know what will happen today, but it is, I think, a marvelous moment. Mrs. Huong has come to the United States, it’s my understanding, for the very, very first time, so let’s welcome her very warmly. (applause) And now, without further ado, I would like to welcome you to this conversation. We have as an interpreter—forgive me for mispronouncing your name, but who am I, anyway, to talk about accents—Nguyen Qui Duc, who is a writer and translator, and Antoine Audouard, who will also help moderate and set the stage for what will be with no doubt a wonderful conversation. (applause) ANTOINE AUDOUARD: My name is Antoine Audouard. I’m a writer from France, and I guess the reason why I have been asked to moderate—that’s a strange word with a very rebellious person—to moderate this event is that, like many people, I guess, a number of angry or adventurous Frenchmen, and a number of quiet Americans, one of my forebears went to Vietnam, was sent to war there for the advancement of civilization. All that’s left in the family is the sword that my grandfather, who was in the French colonial army, took back from his stay in Vietnam in 1914 and a photograph of my father, as a baby, in the arms of his Vietnamese nanny.
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Marisa Silver and Rachel Kushner
Please join us Monday, April 8th, 2013, 5:00pm-6:30pm Vita Nova Lecture Hall (Room 100), Scripps College In featuring A Reading by Two New York Times Bestselling Novelists: Marisa Silver and Rachel Kushner arisa Silver is the author, most recently, of the novel, Mary Coin, a New York Times Bestseller, published in 2013 by M Blue Rider Press/Penguin. Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she was featured in that magazine's first “Debut Fiction” issue. Her collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was published by W.W. Norton in 2001. That collection was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. In 2005, W.W. Norton published her novel, No Direction Home. Her novel, The God of War, was published in 2008 by Simon . and Schuster and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Her second collection of stories, Alone With You, was published by Simon and Schuster in April, 2010. Winner of the O. Henry Prize, her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. Marisa Silver will read from her most recent work, MARY COIN, a novel inspired by Dorothea Lange's iconic depression era photograph, Migrant Mother. Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.
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Stanley Whitney Press Pack
Artforum September 2020 WHERE WE’RE AT: VIEWS FROM ALL OVER STEVEN PARRINO CARCERAL AESTHETICS: NICOLE R. FLEETWOOD TALKS TO RACHEL KUSHNER SEPTEMBER 2020 INTERNATIONAL STANLEY WHITNEY $15.00 Opposite page: Stanley Whitney, Untitled (Can You Hear Us . ), 2020, watercolor, graphite, and 1 1 PROJECT crayon on paper, 10 ⁄2 × 10 ⁄2". Following spread, from left: Stanley Whitney, Untitled (2020—Prison STANLEY WHITNEY Voices), 2020, graphite and crayon 1 1 on paper, 10 ⁄2 × 10 ⁄2". Stanley Whitney, Untitled (Can You Hear Us—No to Prison Life), 2020, watercolor and graphite on paper, 1 1 10 ⁄2 × 10 ⁄2". IN THE DRAWING on the cover of this issue and in the three images that follow, that until our jails and prisons and detention centers are shut down, until we stop the pioneering artist Stanley Whitney incorporates words into his enduring com- enlisting the punitive to preserve our romance with safety, there is no such thing positional touchstone, the four-by-four grid, within which he carries out his vir- as non-prison life. The ethical imperative infuses our collective existence. We tuosic adventures with color. The result is a group of potent pictures with a potent must all say no, irrevocably and unequivocally, right now. message: No to prison life. “Creating space within color involves experiments Along with Whitney’s portfolio, Artforum this month features a conversation with density, vibrancy, saturation, and even with matteness,” Whitney told the art between writer and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood and novelist Rachel Kushner that historian Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur in 2015. “It is not just formal for me— ranges widely over the violence of mass incarceration, the reinvigorated pros- color has great depth; it can bring up great emotion and immense feeling.” Within pects of the abolitionist project, and the art of the imprisoned—art that, the framework of Whitney’s artistry, the straightforward refusal has the power of Fleetwood persuasively argues, must be seen as the core of cultural production the absolute.
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