Author, Rachel Kushner. Photo by Gabby Laurent.
An illegal motorcycle race, a Palestinian refugee camp, the prison abolition movement, the writer Clarice Lispector, a notable Italian movie, a young life in the music scene of San Francisco, and more: Rachel Kushner speaks about creating a through line for a career-spanning collection of nineteen essays in “The Hard Crowd.” These essays plunge into worlds pulsing with life beyond the writer; and she says the essays speak to each other. There is tonal fluidity between literary journalism, memoir, cultural and social criticism, with each essay passing the torch from one to another. It’s not about reflection it’s about reporting on action.
âI finally found a use for Facebookâ: Rachel Kushner. Photograph: Barry J Holmes
âI finally found a use for Facebookâ: Rachel Kushner. Photograph: Barry J Holmes
The acclaimed essayist and novelist on the genius of Don DeLillo, the temptation of motorbikes, and being swept away by CocoRosie
Sat 17 Apr 2021 10.00 EDT
Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1968, writer Rachel Kushner studied political economy at UC Berkeley and earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She published her first novel,
Telex from Cuba, in 2008, followed in 2013 by
The Flamethrowers; her third novel,
The Mars Room,
was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. Her latest book,
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The trouble with being cool is that you have to make it look natural, effortless, almost accidental, and maybe inevitable. It isn’t a simple matter of the interests you’ve cultivated, the freewheeling eccentrics you’ve assembled as a tribe, the life you’ve lived, and the stories you can tell about it. Just as the Renaissance courtier had his sprezzatura, the modern badass must maintain an air of grace and nonchalance, never letting show the glue and cardboard and twine holding together the sturdy leatherbound edifice. And so, writing about being cool is often the riskiest enterprise of all. Reading the result can be like stumbling upon James Gatz’s self-improvement action plan (“Practice elocution, poise, and how to obtain it 5.00-6.00”) and realizing how much awfully self-conscious effort goes into the process of self-invention.
There’s a minor character that appears in Rachel Kushner’s
The Flamethrowers, one of many artists the novel depicts. But the woman Giddle, as she’s called is nothing so recognizable as a sculptor or filmmaker. Rather, her art consists of taking a job as a waitress and becoming “a girl working in a diner, glancing out the windows as she cleaned the counter in small circles with a damp rag.”
A cousin to the fictional Giddle is the real-life Johnny Sherrill, a friend of Kushner’s parents who she describes in her essay “Tramping In The Byways” as an “itinerant carouser, joker, drinker, wordsmith, and lady’s man.” Johnny wrote “action poetry,” which could be any number of things, including pissing on someone’s brand-new Cadillac or the time he left a lit joint on the hood of a parked car before going into a Goodwill, then picked it back up and resumed smoking it on his way out. There are those who “possess a talent for life,” Kushner writes, “people wh
10 New Books We Recommend This Week
April 15, 2021
Some readers are waiting for the next installment in Robert Caro’s multivolume Lyndon Johnson biography as avidly as George R. R. Martin fans eager for “The Winds of Winter” to arrive at last. (Some, I suppose, are at the edge of their seats waiting for both.) If you are among them, why not bide your time with Julia Sweig’s substantial new biography of Johnson’s wife, “Lady Bird Johnson: Hiding in Plain Sight”? Our reviewer, Mimi Swartz, calls it “a book in the Caro mold,” telling the story of America through its subject. That’s one of a passel of new biographies we recommend this week, including Blake Bailey’s long-awaited life of Philip Roth, Edward White’s tessellated study of Alfred Hitchcock and Dorothy Wickenden’s group biography of Frances Seward, Martha Coffin Wright and Harriet Tubman.