Rachel Kushner is the author of Creation Lake, her latest novel, The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection, and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix M�dicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books are translated into twenty-seven languages.
"[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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
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