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Man Booker Shortlisted Author And ‘Girl Citizen’ Speaking to The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear this spring, the novelist Rachel Kushner explained that she thought of herself as a “girl citizen.” Kushner was soon to publish her third novel, “The Mars Room,” which is set inside a California women’s prison. She’d spent a good deal of…
Rachel Kushner, Sally Rooney and Richard Powers are among the authors longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. The prize, given annually, will be awarded on October 16, following the announcement of a shortlist on September 20. Originally restricted to fiction from Commonwealth countries and Ireland, the prize recently attracted controversy after, starting in 2014,…
Much of Rachel Kushner’s third novel is set in Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, but its title — The Mars Room — refers to a San Francisco strip club where Romy Hall, now serving two consecutive life sentences plus six years, once worked. Romy was, on the whole, not unhappy at the Mars Room, a place…
We’ve had one day of spring, and now it is summertime! Congratulations to all; may you have blissful weekends at the beach, in the park, or, if you are a certain Forward writer, doing battle with the Rodent of Unusual Size that has found its way into your apartment’s walls. If you are happily rodent-free,…
It is 2018, and anything is possible: Driverless cars! Nuclear war! Equal pay between movie stars of opposite genders! (Okay, maybe not that.) The world is uncertain, but books can be relied on for pleasure, escapism and, worst of all, information. Here are some of the best fiction and nonfiction releases we’re expecting in upcoming…
There was a time, not so long ago, in the 1960s and ’70s, when being a serious fiction writer required not just a talent for evoking nuanced moments of lived life, but a consciousness of the intellectual and political context in which our lives were being lived. Writers — many of them Jewish — as…
● The Flamethrowers By Rachel Kushner Scribner, 400 pgs, $26.99 In many ways, “The Flamethrowers,” Rachel Kushner’s novel about the historical, political, cultural and — most daringly — ideological chaos of the 1970s, is a simple bildungsroman. It tracks the sentimental education of its heroine, Reno, from starry-eyed, eager youth, lusting after experience — her…
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