The New York Times Book Review - Cristina García
Kushner confidently manages huge swaths of politics and history, intersecting them with the personal lives of her characters, often through cultural or commercial motifs. And she draws interesting, wildly smart parallels between the cultural-political chaos of New York and Italy in the '70s, with Little Italy serving as a distorted mirror of defunct Old World values. All the while, Kushner fearlessly tackles the bigger questions of what constitutes authenticity, voice, identity, class, pitting the aesthetics of wealth against the pragmatics of poverty…in this generous, ambitious and original novel.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
Rachel Kushner's second novel…unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock. In part this is a function of the novel's unfamiliar settings…In part it's the simple fact that Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion…Reno is a persuasive and moving narrator because Ms. Kushner allows her the vulnerability and fuzzy-mindedness of youth while rarely allowing her to think or say a commonplace thing.
The Washington Post - Ron Charles
…a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, [Kushner] strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated. Although she wasn't even a teenager when SoHo became an urban happening, in these pages the wacky, ultimately tragic era comes into focus with vibrant fidelity…What really dazzles, though, is her ability to steer this zigzag plot so expertly that she can let it spin out of control now and then…Hang on: This is a trip you don't want to miss.
Publishers Weekly
This rich second novel from Kushner (Telex from Cuba) takes place in late-’70s New York City and Italy. Reno is a young filmmaker “shopping for experiences,” who, as the novel opens, is attempting to set a land-speed record on her Moto Valera motorcycle in Nevada, only to crash instead. A flashback to New York finds her mixing with a group of artists, among whom she meets Sandro Valera, whose wealthy family manufactures the Moto Valera. Soon they are romantically entwined, and Reno accompanies Sandro on a visit home to Italy. She risks alienating the Valeras by going to their factory to film labor unrest, only to catch Sandro there in flagrante delicto with his cousin Talia. Distraught, she flees with Valera family servant Gianni to Rome, where she discovers Gianni is involved with a volatile protest movement. Snippets from the life of Sandro’s father’s run in intriguing contrast to Reno’s story, presenting his WWI experiences, childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, and the founding of his company. Kushner’s psychological explorations of her characters are incisive, the novel is peppered with subtle ’70s details, and it bursts with you-are-there depictions of its time and places. Agent Susan Golomb, Susan Golomb Agency. (Apr.)
Bookforum - Christian Lorentzen
The Flamethrowers is about machines (motorcycles and guns, but also cameras) and the way they revolutionized the last century (its politics and violence, but also its art)…[Kushner’s] style is a rare blend of romanticism and historicism—with a sense of precision.
Francisco Goldman
In this extremely bold, swashbuckling novel, romantic and disillusioned at once, intellectually daring and even subversive, Rachel Kushner has created the most beguiling American ingénue abroad, well, maybe ever: Daisy Miller as a sharply observant yet vulnerable Reno-raised motorcycle racer and aspiring artist, set loose in gritty 70s New York and the Italy of the Red Brigades.
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."
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.
Robert Stone
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.
Hari Kunzru
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.
Rivka Galchen
I didn't know what it could possibly look like for something to be a super smart sexy novel; now I know. The Flamethrowers is its own category of Wow, and Kushner is the champion of something strange, wonderful and real.
Colm Tóibín
The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and serious American novel. The sentences are sharp and gorgeously made. The scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace. Kushner writes about excitement and tension with gusto and grace; she describes Italy and New York with a dark and savvy irony.
STARRED review Booklist
In her smash-hit debut, Telex from Cuba (2008), Kushner took on corporate imperialism and revolution, themes that also stoke this knowing and imaginative saga of a gutsy yet naïve artist from Nevada… Kushner, with searing insights, contrasts the obliteration of the line between life and art in hothouse New York with life-or-death street battles in Rome. Adroitly balancing astringent social critique with deep soundings of the complex psyches of her intriguing characters, Kushner has forged an incandescently detailed, cosmopolitan, and propulsively dramatic tale of creativity and destruction.
The Daily Beast - Jimmy So
The Flamethrowers not only harnesses the energies of violent Italian politics; it also converts the intensity of radical New York visual art into shining, whirling prose.
New York Daily News - Sherryl Connelly
Rachel Kushner so deftly interweaves the story of an Italian industrialist with that of a young woman insinuating herself into the 1970s New York art scene that The Flamethrowers slowly and seductively becomes a novel you just can’t quit.
Flavorwire - Emily Temple
Exhilarating, psychologically complex, and perfectly intense, this is a thrilling contemporary novel likely to become a cultural touchstone.
O, the Oprah magazine - Kristy Davis
Electric…addictive…smart and satisfying.
The Cleveland Plain Dealer - Karen Long
Kushner can write like blazes.
Entertainment Weekly - Melissa Maerz
Vividly drawn…[A] keenly observed story.
The Boston Globe - Eugenia Williamson
Brilliant and exhilarating…Kushner fearlessly tackles art, death, and social unrest. In so doing, she has written the sort of relentless and immersive novel that forces the reader to look up and make sure the room hasn’t disappeared around her.
The Los Angeles Times - David Ulin
A white-hot ember of a book…
NPR - Maud Newton
[A] brilliant lightning bolt of a novel…The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture—psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women—with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency.
Vogue - Megan O’Grady
Exhilarating…it’s impossible not to be pulled in by the author’s sense of the period’s vitality…the novel’s brilliance is in its understanding of art’s relationship to risk, and in its portrait of Reno’s—and New York’s—age of innocence.
Bloomberg News - Craig Seligman
[A] big, rich wonder of a novel… [Kushner’s] polychrome sentences…are shot through with all the longing and regret you find in those of Thomas Pynchon, whose influence is all over this novel… a glittering, grave, brutally unsentimental book that’s spectacularly written enough to touch greatness.
Harper’s - Tom Bissell
Life, gazed at with exemplary intensity over hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences precision-etched with detail—that’s what The Flamethrowers feels like. That’s what it is. And it could scarcely be better. The Flamethrowers is a political novel, a feminist novel, a sexy novel, and a kind of thriller…Virtually every page contains a paragraph that merits—and rewards—rereading."
The New Yorker - James Wood
Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story… it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading… Kushner employs a[n]…eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical…Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno’s reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos…[Kushner’s] novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.
Vanity Fair - Elissa Schappell
Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers.
The New York Times Book Review - Jonathan Franzen
Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist.
From the Publisher
Exhilarating…it’s impossible not to be pulled in by the author’s sense of the period’s vitality…the novel’s brilliance is in its understanding of art’s relationship to risk, and in its portrait of Reno’s—and New York’s—age of innocence.”
“Life, gazed at with exemplary intensity over hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences precision-etched with detail—that’s what The Flamethrowers feels like. That’s what it is. And it could scarcely be better. The Flamethrowers is a political novel, a feminist novel, a sexy novel, and a kind of thriller…Virtually every page contains a paragraph that merits—and rewards—rereading."
“[A] brilliant lightning bolt of a novel…The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture—psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women—with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency.”
“Kushner is a vivid storyteller, worth reading for her sentences alone. But even more, read her because of her ambition, her ability to push the novel beyond the personal and into an engagement with the larger world.”
“Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers.”
"Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno’s reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos…[The Flamethrowers] is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.”
“Brilliant and exhilarating…Kushner fearlessly tackles art, death, and social unrest. In so doing, she has written the sort of relentless and immersive novel that forces the reader to look up and make sure the room hasn’t disappeared around her.”
“Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Flamethrowers, is a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, she strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated…[Kushner is] a superb recent-historical novelist…20 brilliant pages [of The Flamethrowers] could make any writer’s career: a set piece of New York night life that’s a daze of comedy, poignancy and violence…Hang on: This is a trip you don’t want to miss.”
“The Flamethrowers is about machines (motorcycles and guns, but also cameras) and the way they revolutionized the last century (its politics and violence, but also its art)…[Kushner’s] style is a rare blend of romanticism and historicism—with a sense of precision.”
“Vividly drawn…[A] keenly observed story.
FEBRUARY 2014 - AudioFile
Christina Traister’s narration reflects 21-year-old Reno’s charged emotions as she moves to New York City and the 1970s Greenwich Village art scene. An aspiring artist, Reno comes from “reckless, unsentimental people,” and she loves two things: drawing and speed. Reno falls for Sandro, the son of an Italian motorcycle manufacturer. Traister easily handles the flashbacks highlighting Sandro’s father’s life, from his childhood in Egypt to his horrific WWI experiences to the founding of his motorcycle empire. Traister’s performance makes Kushner’s superb prose credible, beautifully reflecting the art world and political upheavals of the period. FLAMETHROWERS was a finalist of the 2013 National Book Awards, as was Kushner’s earlier work TELEX FROM CUBA in 2008. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
FEBRUARY 2014 - AudioFile
Christina Traister’s narration reflects 21-year-old Reno’s charged emotions as she moves to New York City and the 1970s Greenwich Village art scene. An aspiring artist, Reno comes from “reckless, unsentimental people,” and she loves two things: drawing and speed. Reno falls for Sandro, the son of an Italian motorcycle manufacturer. Traister easily handles the flashbacks highlighting Sandro’s father’s life, from his childhood in Egypt to his horrific WWI experiences to the founding of his motorcycle empire. Traister’s performance makes Kushner’s superb prose credible, beautifully reflecting the art world and political upheavals of the period. FLAMETHROWERS was a finalist of the 2013 National Book Awards, as was Kushner’s earlier work TELEX FROM CUBA in 2008. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
A novel of art and politics but also of bikes and speed--not Harleys and drugs, but fine (and fast) Italian motorbikes. At 21, Reno (who goes by the name of the city she comes from) has graduated with a degree in art from the University of Nevada-Reno, and she does what any aspiring artist would like to--heads to New York City. She gets her kicks by riding a Moto Valera, a magnificent example of Italian engineering. In fact, for one brief shining moment in 1976, she sets a speed record of 308.506 mph on her bike at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. This impressive achievement occurs the year after she'd headed to New York, where she'd taken up with--amazing coincidence--Sandro Valera, scion of the Italian manufacturer of the motorbikes she favors and, like Reno, an aspiring artist in New York. Other coincidences abound--for example, that Reno had had sex with a young man, and they'd agreed not to exchange names, but shortly afterward she finds out he's a close friend of Sandro's, and he goes on to play a major role in her life. Kushner spends a considerable amount of time flashing us back to the Valera who founded the firm in the early 20th century, and she updates the fate of the company when Reno and Sandro visit his family home in Italy. There they experience both a huge demonstration and eventually the kidnapping of Sandro's father, a victim of the political turbulence of the 1970s. Kushner writes well and plunges us deeply into the disparate worlds of the New York City art scene, European political radicalism and the exhilarating rush of motorcycles.
