Kushner is the champion of something strange, wonderful and real.

Rivka Galchen

Rachel Kushner

The only writer to ever be nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction for both a first and second novel, Rachel Kushner is clearly an author to watch. Kushner began her Bachelor’s in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley when she was only sixteen and went on to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She published her first novel, Telex from Cuba, in 2008. Kushner has edited for Grand Street Magazine, BOMB, Soft Targets, and Artforum, among others. Her fiction and essays can be found in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, and frequently focus on issues of feminism, contemporary art, revolutionary politics, culture, and modernism. In 2013 New York Magazine called Kushner’s second book, The Flamethrowers, “probably the most heatedly discussed book of the year.” For this title Kushner was a finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tate Black Prize, and the Bailey’s Prize. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2013 as well as an honorary PhD from Kalamazoo College. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

cover image of the book The Strange Case of Rachel K

The Strange Case of Rachel K

The three pieces gathered in The Strange Case of Rachel K roughly map the genesis of Rachel Kushner’s fiction. From the fate of a conquistador in “The Great Exception,” to the illegal radio broadcasts and then bombs in “Debouchment,” to a Havana courtesan’s “strange” case, these stories build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful.

In this collection, which “overflows in atmosphere as it shows off the burgeoning talent of one of our best writers” (NPR), Rachel Kushner is forging her own original path into the wilds of contemporary fiction.

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cover image of the book Covert Joy: Selected Stories

Covert Joy: Selected Stories

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Katrina Dodson

With a contribution by Rachel Kushner

This radiant selection of Clarice Lispector’s best and best-loved stories includes such familiar favorites as “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Love,” “Family Ties,” and “The Egg and the Chicken.” Lispector’s luminous regard for life’s small revelatory incidents is legendary, and here her genius is concentrated in a fizzing, portable volume. Covert Joy offers the particular bliss a book can bring that she expresses in the title story:

Joy would always be covert for me. . . Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap, not touching it, in the purest ecstasy. I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.

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cover image of the book Malina

Malina

by Ingeborg Bachmann

Translated by Philip Boehm

With a contribution by Rachel Kushner

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, “deathstyles,” the roots of fascism, and passion.

“Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn’t war and peace, there’s only war."—Ingeborg Bachmann

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Kushner is the champion of something strange, wonderful and real.

Rivka Galchen

Full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.

James Wood, The New Yorker

Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in the mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.

Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

Kushner’s writing is fluid and clear and possesses a rhythm as determined as an ocean current. Readers will encounter three stories of terrific depth.

Publishers Weekly

The title story is a bitter and perfumed prose study in sensuality and brutal compromise with life’s harsh demands.

Alan Cheuse, NPR

Kushner’s writing is fluid and clear and possesses a rhythm as determined as an ocean current. In this slim book, readers will encounter three stories of terrific depth.

Publishers Weekly

The Kushner of The Strange Case of Rachel K is interested primarily in myth, sex, epistemology and rhetoric, the boundaries of what can be known and how, the female and male gaze, and infinity.

Gavin Tomson, Highway Magazine

There’s a quality of iridescence to Kushner’s writing. Many of the passages are multi-colored: tilted one way you see one colour, tilted another the colour changes.

Hermione Hoby, The Guardian

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.

Dwight Gardner, New York Times Book Review

Kushner is a vivid storyteller.

David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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