It seems that of the essays by author-critics that I've been reading over the past while, some of the very best have been by women: Zadie Smith's two volumes (Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, Feel Free: Essays) and Joan Didion's The White Album both seldom failed to charm, enlighten and entertain me to no end, and only the latest volume by Martin Amis (The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1986-2016) could rival them for me. And now, Rachel Kushne...

Kushner is a fearless intellectual that has lived her life taking risks—huge risks. Risks that many of her friends and acquaintances did not survive. For instance, in ‘A Girl on a Motorcycle’, she describes her participation in the illegal Cabo 1000 motorcycle race where a fellow motorcyclist pulled out in front of her going 30mph, while she was doing 130. She wiped out—and neither she nor her motorcycle fared well. Years later, we learn that many of the cyclists she participated with that day a...

“To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.”

These sorts of collections are for completists. If you love everything the author does you'll enjoy it. If not, you'll find the collection forgettable. Even if you do love the author you're not going to love everything and you're really only reading it because you'll read anything she does. This collection gives a background into Kushner's interests and where she has drawn material for her novels from.I loved Kushner's novel "The Flamethrowers" but after reading the art essays in this book I'm s...

In a recent Zoom conversation between George Saunders and Tobias Wolfe, Rachel Kushner's name came up -- Saunders said he would read whatever she wrote. She is one of those special talents who is equally at home in fiction as well as non-, and this collection of essays showcases her proficiency with the latter. Her material covers subjects ranging from a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp to portraits of unconventional personalities, but when she is writing about her own experience, well, that'...

I’ll just admit straight out that I am in love with this book. I have had an imperfect relationship with Kushner's works- I devoured and marveled at The Flamethrowers, but was not as impressed by her last novel, The Mars Room. I admired what she was trying to say, but it felt less bold, less sweeping in scope than I had expected. But this book, in it's collection of essays, feels so potent and vibrant that I am again a convert. It may be that I am also someone who lived in SF during the same yea...

This was an interesting collection. I hadn't read any of her non-fiction before but really enjoyed it. Kushner is one if thoes authors I would love to hang out with. In these essays which were written throughout the last 20 years she covers a variety of subjects. Her more personal essays were my favorites. Like one about a motorcycle race down in Mexico, and another about working in various rock club. And the literary essays I enjoyed too, about Denis Johnson, Cormac McCarthy and another about M...

Rtc when I collate my notes from the LRB event I went to!

Girl on a Motorcycle - Great story about Kushner doing an illegal motorcycle race in Mexico and crashing. Feels like it was pulled directly from The Flamethrowers, but of course, The Flamethrowers pulled this story directly from Kushner's life.We Are Orphans Here - Travelogue about Kushner's visit with refugees in East Jerusalem. It's both depressing and inspiring, because it deals with humans treating each other inhumanely, but it's about how beautiful humans can be as well.Earth Angel - Essay

Rachel Kushner's books ricocheted up my must-read list after The Mars Room became one of my top reads for 2018. Rereading my review of that novel I noted : Interesting anecdotes about prison escapes, the Norman Mailer / Jack Abott story and excerpts from the decoded Ted Kaczynski dairies, although interesting, often threatened to get in the way of the story-telling. The line between good fiction and non-fiction wears too thin for me at times Here in full non-fiction mode and thus free of my hu...

Very well written and felt essays. I personally would have liked less essays about art, literature, film and more about life, culture, politics. Her essays about the motorcycle race and the refugee camp in Jerusalem are absolutely outstanding for instance. Thank you Simon and Schuster and Edelweiss for the ARC.

Really Rachel Kushner is the coolest girl ever- she writes about her life in different places and travels and motorcycle racing ,and vintage cars and English 1960`s novels ,the ones i also love. She also has lived in Italy and understands Italian people very well ,she is probably 20 or more years younger than i am but much in common . Wish i was so very daring and brave at her age. if you have not read Flamethrower get right on it quite the book,quite the writer-

This book often gets included in excellent books of non fiction.Not sure why.Kushner’s entries on the all day Baja motorcycle race and the Palestinian settlements in Jerusalem are the best of the lot bc they are her experiencing life.However, too many of the stories are deconstruction of 70’s Italian artists or just name checks of all the folks she blew by in her peripatetic life.She owns the latter by the end and that self awareness saves the collection a bit for me but I can’t see much enjoyme...

Felt like getting schooled by someone cooler and smarter than me at a party, mostly in the thrall but zoning out once or twice when they got onto a subject I cared less about. I think what I mean is this book has charisma? I was willing to follow wherever it went.

My thanks to Scribner and NetGalley for an e-ARC of this new collection. OK, I LOVED her personal reminiscences! And I have to wonder if she handed me a drink one evening when she worked the bars at Bill Graham's clubs. And ya gotta love that she is a gearhead from an early age. The title essay brought back a lot of memories of obscure little joints and music clubs I would go to on occasion. And ah yes, Polk Gulch! OTOH, I found myself browse reading some of her pieces on literature, film, and a...

'I was the weak link, the mind always at some remove: watching myself and other people, absorbing the events of their lives and mine. To be hard is to let things roll off you, to live in the present, to not dwell or worry. And even though I stayed out late, was committed to the end, some part of me had left early. To become a writer is to have left early no matter what time you got home.'

The essays in The Hard Crowd are on subjects varied enough it's highly unlikely they'll all be of interest to any one person, and a few of them are actually sort of muddled. The best ones, though, are nothing short of excellent. The stand-outs are: Girl on A Motorcycle, a piece that sociologically dissects a race Kushner went on, We Are Orphans Here, about a Palestinian community locked into a slummy ghetto in Jerusalem, and The Hard Crowd, about growing up in gritty, old San Francisco. I moved

A Didion for the new millennium.

This collection of essays, like any collection, will have ones that resonate and ones that pass in shadows. I've loved both The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room, novels that were searing depictions of a class of people well outside my experience. Some of that same intensity burns here as well, mostly the memoir essays: "Girl on a Motorcycle", "Not with the Band", "Made to Burn," and "The Hard Crowd." Even if she was more spectator that enthusiastic participant, Kushner passed through a life in Sa...

During an otherwise forgettable errand last spring, I heard an unforgettable City Arts & Lectures conversation with the author Rachel Kushner, in which she read an excerpt from the titular story in her collection of essays (2000-2020), the Hard Crowd.Radio programming occasionally has kept me in the car an extra two minutes, but I can count on one hand the times I've just surrendered the full hour to sitting and listening rapt in a grocery-store parking lot with the engine off.Kushner did that f...