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.

... takes the reader on a wild ride. [Kushner] is the kind of writer who comes straight at you in understated sentences that always add up to much more than their individual parts of speech. Her essays, like her fiction, are invariably thought provoking and moving, by turns surprising and heartbreaking.

... not so much Kushner’s own memoir as a group biography of recklessness. Contained within her flippant self-construction-as-bore is in fact a claim on the exciting—a suggestion that the writer’s own softness is key to her accurate rendering of others’ hardness.

... brilliant.

From the first time I read Rachel Kushner’s novels, I thought about nonfiction. The biting yet elegant voices of her narrators reminded me of literary criticism, and the detailed renderings of people and places I thought resembled journalism.

Kushner might have made drinks with a Rolling Stone all night long, but a part of her is also the observer, noting things down for later use...In this, and in other sections throughout the book, are echoes of her great predecessor, Joan Didion, in particular the latter’s charting of the hedonism of San Francisco in the 1960s and 1970s...That same sentiment of mining life’s experiences for precious nuggets is evident throughout The Hard Crowd.

That act of close listening is key to Kushner’s broader artistic project. Any social revolutionary process, she writes, citing both Marx and Balestrini, must be rooted in actual working-class experience. And in her novels, which frequently ask us to attend to voices on the margins, we can see this revolutionary process at work.

... a writer seemingly of another time.

... through all the death—and because of it—Kushner’s collection is about the literary life. Nearly every essay here ponders what it takes to be a writer, and who it’s taken from.

Much is revealed in this vitalizing essay collection. Kushner’s autobiographical pieces illuminate complicated aspects of her adventurous life and why and how she developed the skills to write about it with such breath-catching clarity and polished rigor, the literary equivalent of the fine-tuned mechanics of the motorcycles and classic cars she treasures. Here are riveting accounts.

It’s that intense, discerning absorption, coupled with a deep knowledge acquired through reading literature and philosophy beyond her social milieu (a virtue for which she barely gives herself credit), that really knits The Hard Crowd together. Every page unfolds with an energy and rigor that places it distinctly apart from typical survival-lit fare whose superficial sensations can pall after a few dangerous yarns.

Though these pieces have been published before, all have been edited or reworked for this volume, which means that rather than giving a sense of an essayist in development, the book highlights the sheer variety of subjects that have interested, perplexed, and troubled the writer throughout her career.

Kushner writes with equal verve about the self’s ecstatic movement into the world and the world’s permeation of self.

Many of the pieces in this collection are memorable portraits of artists, writers, and musicians that emphasize their eccentricities, charisma, and legacies. Kushner’s own voice is always present, but those essays that most directly address her personal experiences feel the most alive. Kushner shares her stories in a way that manages to be personal but not self-serving.

Character sketches and nostalgic detail pepper this wide-ranging essay collection.

The essays serve as testaments to the author’s talent for marshaling her softness into a curiosity that allows her to write capably on a variety of subjects. These include the exceptional opening essay.