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56
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
31/100Critics
80/100Scholars
Author:
Rachel Kushner
Publisher:
Scribner
Date:
April 6, 2021
A collection of essays that spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
What The Reviewers Say
Kushner reminds us that she writes as well as any writer alive about the pleasure of a good motor doing what it was designed to do.
Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner's] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray.
... in this collection, featuring 19 pieces of edgy memoir, eclectic journalism and diverse criticism, Kushner consistently delivers on the promise of that exciting opener.
Kushner, primarily known for her fiction, proves she’s also a master essayist in The Hard Crowd: 19 pieces of memoir and criticism that display her omnivorous tastes in literature, art and history.
