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The Flamethrowers: A Novel
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine’s #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue;O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker;Time;Flavorwire;Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast
“Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”—The New Yorker
Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
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The Flamethrowers: A Novel
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine’s #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue;O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker;Time;Flavorwire;Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast
“Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”—The New Yorker
Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine’s #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue;O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker;Time;Flavorwire;Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast
“Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”—The New Yorker
Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
Rachel Kushner is the New York Times bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013. Telex from Cuba, won the California Book Award and a New York Times Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, the Paris Review, and Grand Street.
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
“Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist.”—Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom
“Oscillating between the hedonistic New York artworld and Italy in the midst of the Years of Lead, The Flamethrowers is that rare thing, a novel that uses recent history not as a picturesque backdrop, but as a way of interrogating the present. Kushner’s urgent prose and psychological acuity make this one of the most compelling and enjoyable novels I’ve read this year.”—Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men
“The controlled intensity and perception in Rachel Kushner's novels mark her as one of the most brilliant writers of the oncoming century. She's going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. Rachel Kushner is a novelist of the very first order. The Flamethrowers follows Telex from Cuba as a masterful work.”—Robert Stone
Karen Russell
“The Flamethrowers lives up to its incendiary title—it is a brilliant, startling truly revolutionary book about the New York art world of the seventies, Italian class warfare, and youth's blind acceleration into the unknown. Kushner is a genius prose stylist, and her Reno is one of the most fully realized protagonists I've ever encountered, moving fluidly from the fringe of the fringe movement to the center of the action. I want to recommend this stunning book to everyone I know.”
Dana Spiotta
"Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel.
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Two writers from the Discover Great New Writers program on their influences, the reactions they hope to produce, and the books that compelled them to create their own.
“…A part of the point of the book was to not shy away from what we shy away from in real life. And one of the things we shy away from in real life is admitting for exactly how long we are a mess and don’t know what we’re doing.” From her classic essay collections, […]