Description

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

Publisher Review

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