The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020

From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics & culture.

In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, & cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes & real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.

In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, & writing about art & literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons & Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, & writing.

Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake & The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her previous novels, Telex from Cuba & The Flamethrowers, were both New York Times bestsellers & finalists for the National Book Award. She has also written a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s & the Paris Review. Kushner has won the Prix Médicis & been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, & was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction.