Reviews
"Heartbreaking and unforgettable... [ The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review "Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity... This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large." -- Booklist , Starred Review "A searing look at life on the margins...This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch...gripping." -- Kirkus Reviews "Kushner is back with another stunner...without a shred of sentimentality, Kushner makes us see these characters as humans who are survivors, getting through life the only way they are able given their circumstances." -- Library Journal, "Like Denis Johnson in 'Jesus' Son,' Kushner is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace... The Mars Room is a major novel ." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times, "An essential novel...Kushner is a bit of a magician, exploring bleak territory with pathos and urgency that makes it nearly impossible to stop reading." -- AM New York "Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters' situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel." -- BookPage "Kushner's writing is clipped and sharp, as she tells the story of [Romy's] adjustment to life behind bars -- and how she got there." -- The Week "An enormously ambitious project profoundly rooted in a particular time and place... Kushner's greatest achievement in this unique work of brilliance and rigor is to urge us all to take responsibility for the unconscionable state of the world in which we operate blithely every single day." --Jennifer Croft, The Los Angeles Review of Books "Rachel Kushner cements her place as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today... The Mars Room makes most other contemporary fiction seem timid and predictable." --Michael Lindgren, The Millions, " Kushner's got the talent to justify the hype ... The Mars Room builds to a redemption that comes from hard truth, sharp and broken and shaped by an author of exceptional power and grace." --Jeff Baker, The Seattle Times, " The Mars Room affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists...her stories slink in the margins, but they have the feel of something iconic." --Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly, " Readers will savor every detail of Ms. Kushner's descriptive passages, which bring ferocious beauty to even the ugliest surroundings." --Leigh Anne Focareta, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PRAISE FOR RACHEL KUSHNER: " The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times, ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE MARS ROOM: "Heartbreaking and unforgettable... [ The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review, "[An] electrifying take on the chaos of 1980s San Francisco." --Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair "Phosphorescently vivid." --Megan O'Grady, T Magazine "Superb and gritty... Kushner has an exceptional ability to be in the heads of her character." --Eve MacSweeney, Vogue "A powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn't consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite..." --Laura Miller, Slate "Kushner's characters are so authentic and vividly drawn that with each new novel, it's easy to assume she's tapped out. Yet in The Mars Room , she brings to life another remarkable heroine." --Time Magazine, "Absorbing... The Mars Room is impeccably researched without ever seeming dry or preachy... insightful...authoritative...haunting." -- Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle "Kushner's got the talent to justify the hype... The Mars Room builds to a redemption that comes from hard truth, sharp and broken and shaped by an author of exceptional power and grace." --Jeff Baker, The Seattle Times "The book is beautifully written, without sentimentality or agenda, and at times even [with] a sly and dark humor." --Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Readers will savor every detail of Ms. Kushner's descriptive passages, which bring ferocious beauty to even the ugliest surroundings." --Leigh Anne Focareta, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette "[Kushner is] an exceptionally talented and philosophically minded writer." --Jessica Zack, The San Francisco Chronicle, "In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity... This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large ...Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner's dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free." -- Booklist , Starred Review, "Stunning... The Mars Room follows a woman, separated from her young son, who is serving two consecutive life sentences in a women's correctional facility in California. A gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison." -- Buzzfeed, Rachel Kushner's fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers ., "Kushner's characters are so authentic and vividly drawn that with each new novel, it's easy to assume she's tapped out. Yet in The Mars Room , she brings to life another remarkable heroine." --Time Magazine, "Much of the action of Rachel Kushner's brilliant new novel is set in California prisons...But the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions--Dostoyevskian questions--about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape...Kushner is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters' situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel." -- BookPage, "The book is beautifully written, without sentimentality or agenda, and at times even [with] a sly and dark humor." --Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, "Absorbing... The Mars Room is impeccably researched without ever seeming dry or preachy... insightful...authoritative...haunting." --Alexis Burling, San Francisco Chronicle "Kushner's got the talent to justify the hype... The Mars Room builds to a redemption that comes from hard truth, sharp and broken and shaped by an author of exceptional power and grace." --Jeff Baker, The Seattle Times "The book is beautifully written, without sentimentality or agenda, and at times even [with] a sly and dark humor." --Holly Silva, St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Readers will savor every detail of Ms. Kushner's descriptive passages, which bring ferocious beauty to even the ugliest surroundings." --Leigh Anne Focareta, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette "[Kushner is] an exceptionally talented and philosophically minded writer." --Jessica Zack, The San Francisco Chronicle, "A revelatory novel about women on the margins of society...it's a true feat of Kushner's extraordinary writing that such profound ugliness can result in such tumultuous beauty." --Maris Kreizman, Vulture "Stunning...Heartbreaking and wholly original." -- Bustle "A probing portrait of contemporary America." -- Entertainment Weekly "Unflinching." -- Elle "Kushner's great gift is for the evocation of a scene, a time and place." --Harper's, "Heartbreaking and unforgettable... [ The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written." -- Publishers Weekly, Starred Review, " The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful--from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back." --Dana Spiotta, 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 gorgeous, contemplative slow ride after two burners... The Mars Room sings." --Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum, "Kushner has authority in spades, seemingly without reaching for it, as if she were just born that way." --Laura Miller, Salon, "[Rachel Kushner is] one of the most gifted novelists of her generation--on the same tier as Jennifer Egan and the two Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem...[ The Mars Room is] a page turner ... blackly comic ...Part of Kushner's achievement here is that she makes this character, for all her shortcomings, so appealing... It's one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart, and in its passion for social justice you can finally discern a connection between all three of Kushner's novels ...In The Mars Room , the neglected become the focus, and it's apparent that Kushner's imagination, almost Dickensian in its amplitude, also embraces some of Dicken's reformist zeal...so powerful and realistic you come away convinced that all...escapes are illusory, and that even for those who get out, prison is still a life sentence." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review (Cover Review), "A powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn't consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite. ." --Laura Miller, Slate ?, PRAISE FOR TELEX FROM CUBA: "Multilayered and absorbing... Studded with illuminating images....Kushner has fashioned a story that will linger like a whiff of decadent Colony perfume." -- Susann Cokal, The New York Times Book Review (cover review), "[Kushner is] an exceptionally talented and philosophically minded writer." --Jessica Zack, The San Francisco Chronicle, "Potent...an incendiary examination of flawed justice and the stacked deck of a system that entraps women who were born into poverty... The Mars Room is more than a novel; it's an investigation, an exercise in empathy, an eyes-wide-open work of art." --Kelly Luce, Oprah, "With its sharp detail and precisely drawn characters, Telex from Cuba offers a compelling look at a paradise corrupted." -- People magazine (pick of the week, 3 stars out of 4), "Like Denis Johnson in 'Jesus' Son,' Kushner is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace... The Mars Room is a major novel." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times "Kushner uses the novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking." -- The New Yorker "[Rachel Kushner is] one of the most gifted novelists of her generation--on the same tier as Jennifer Egan and the two Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem...[ The Mars Room is] a page turner... blackly comic...It's one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart." --Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review (Cover Review) " The Mars Room affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists...her stories slink in the margins, but they have the feel of something iconic." --Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly, " A searing, tragic look at life in the prison-industrial complex , covering poverty, sex work, mass incarceration, education, trauma, suffering, love, and redemption. Somehow, Kushner's rapid-fire, imaginative prose makes it seems effortless." -- Vogue, 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., "Kushner is a woman with the chops, ambition and killer instinct to rub shoulders with all those big, swinging male egos who routinely get worshipped as geniuses." --John Powers, Fresh Air "[A] tough, prismatic and quite gripping novel...wholly authentic...profound...surprisingly luminous." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "A disturbing and atmospheric book...Ms Kushner makes the prison, and the world beyond its walls, vivid." -- The Economist "A searing, tragic look at life in the prison-industrial complex, covering poverty, sex work, mass incarceration, education, trauma, suffering, love, and redemption. Somehow, Kushner's rapid-fire, imaginative prose makes it seems effortless." -- Vogue "Potent...an incendiary examination of flawed justice and the stacked deck of a system that entraps women who were born into poverty... The Mars Room is more than a novel; it's an investigation, an exercise in empathy, an eyes-wide-open work of art." --Kelly Luce, Oprah, "A disturbing and atmospheric book...Ms Kushner makes the prison, and the world beyond its walls, vivid." -- The Economist, "The whole history of the novel is alive in Rachel Kushner's hands, making her an indispensable contemporary. I look to her books to see what fiction can do now." --Ben Lerner, "Rachel Kushner cements her place as the most vital and interesting American novelist working today... The Mars Room makes most other contemporary fiction seem timid and predictable." --Michael Lindgren, The Millions, The Flamethrowers 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...Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of .... Robert Stone and Joan Didion ...[Kushner has] a sensibility that's on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty... persuasive and moving ...provocative., " A searing look at life on the margins ...This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch...gripping." -- Kirkus Reviews, "[An] electrifying take on the chaos of 1980s San Francisco." --Sloane Crosely, Vanity Fair "Phosphorescently vivid." --Megan O'Grady, T Magazine "Superb and gritty... Kushner has an exceptional ability to be in the heads of her character." --Eve MacSweeney, Vogue "A powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn't consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite..." --Laura Miller, Slate "Kushner's characters are so authentic and vividly drawn that with each new novel, it's easy to assume she's tapped out. Yet in The Mars Room , she brings to life another remarkable heroine." --Time Magazine, "Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers was one of the best books of 2013 and its predecessor, Telex from Cuba , earned the Los Angeles-based writer her first National Book Award nomination. Unlike Kushner's first two books, The Mars Room is set in 21st-century America, at a women's prison where Romy Hall is serving two life sentences. Kushner's writing is clipped and sharp, as she tells the story of Hall's adjustment to life behind bars -- and how she got there." -- The Week, "In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity... This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large...Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner's dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free." -- Booklist , Starrred Review, "Reading The Mars Room is a profoundly affecting experience, very nearly overwhelming, and yet it absolutely must be read. Kushner's first two novels ( Telex from Cuba , The Flamethrowers ) were National Book Award finalists. It would be baffling if The Mars Room does not win this year's." --Cory Oldweiler, amNewYork "[A] stunning new book... Kushner deploys the masterful storytelling she's known for...an unmistakable voice. " --Town and Country "Brilliant and devastating...Kushner doesn't make a false move in her third novel; she writes with an intelligence and a ferocity that sets her apart from most others in her cohort. She's a remarkably original and compassionate author, and The Mars Room is a heartbreaking, true and nearly flawless novel." --Michael Schaub, NPR.org, "Kushner is a masterful world-creator, and her accomplishment here is unparalleled." -- Nylon "Kushner's writing and thinking are always invigorating, urgent, and painterly precise." --Vulture "Stunning... a gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison." -- Buzzfeed "Gorgeous... The Mars Room sings." --Sasha Frere-Jones, Bookforum, " Telex From Cuba exerts the mysterious pull of a super-saturated postcard from a distant land, sent to you by a stranger. Kushner brilliantly transforms her family history -- and history -- into a page-turning, elegantly intelligent, and politically enlightening novel that rings as true as anything. Hers is an epic achievement." -- Heidi Julavits, author of The Uses of Enchantment, "Brilliant and devastating ...Kushner does a masterful job evoking the isolation and hopelessness intrinsic to a life behind bars...Kushner's greatest accomplishment in The Mars Room is the character of Romy...The other characters are all perfectly rendered as well... Kushner doesn't make a false move in her third novel; she writes with an intelligence and a ferocity that sets her apart from most others in her cohort. She's a remarkably original and compassionate author, and The Mars Room is a heartbreaking, true and nearly flawless novel ." --Michael Schaub, NPR.org, "A revelatory novel about women on the margins of society...it's a true feat of Kushner's extraordinary writing that such profound ugliness can result in such tumultuous beauty." --Maris Kreizman, Vulture, "Kushner is a woman with the chops, ambition and killer instinct to rub shoulders with all those big, swinging male egos who routinely get worshipped as geniuses." --John Powers, Fresh Air, "Uniquely informed, empathetic...an addictive novel, laced throughout with a bracing intelligence...this is an extraordinary book." --Joshua Ferris, "This essential novel is about women ignored or denigrated or discounted in our society, and the adult men who obsess over them and abuse them and abet their self-destruction. Kushner is a bit of a magician, exploring bleak territory with pathos and urgency that makes it nearly impossible to stop reading." -- AM New York, "[Kushner's] best book yet, another big step forward." --Jonathan Franzen, The Guardian "Uniquely informed, empathetic...an addictive novel, laced throughout with a bracing intelligence...this is an extraordinary book." --Joshua Ferris "The whole history of the novel is alive in Rachel Kushner's hands, making her an indispensable contemporary. I look to her books to see what fiction can do now." --Ben Lerner " The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful--from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back." --Dana Spiotta, "A disturbing and atmospheric book...Ms Kushner makes the prison, and the world beyond its walls, vivid." --? The Economist, "Stunning... a gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison." -- Buzzfeed, " Superb and gritty ... Kushner has an exceptional ability to be in the heads of her character." --Eve MacSweeney, Vogue, " Kushner is back with another stunner ...without a shred of sentimentality, Kushner makes us see these characters as humans who are survivors, getting through life the only way they are able given their circumstances." -- Library Journal, "A searing, tragic look at life in the prison-industrial complex, covering poverty, sex work, mass incarceration, education, trauma, suffering, love, and redemption. Somehow, Kushner's rapid-fire, imaginative prose makes it seems effortless." -- Vogue, "A searing look at life on the margins...This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch...gripping." -- Kirkus Reviews, " [A] stunning new book ... Kushner deploys the masterful storytelling she's known for...an unmistakable voice. " --Town and Country
