The Hard Crowd
€11.99
In her 20s Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love – motorbikes – to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 130mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life. ‘The Hard Crowd’ is a white-knuckle ride through that life; a book about muscling your way through, finding your own path and, as she says in the hair-raising opening piece, ‘completing the ride without dying’. In 19 razor-sharp essays she explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones.
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From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.
In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.
In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.
'I'm glad to taste something this sharp, this smart' Olivia Laing
'Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout' Vogue
'An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year
Additional information
| Weight | 235 g |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 19.8 × 12.8 × 1.9 cm |
| Book_author | Kushner, Rachel |
| Publisher | VINTAGE |
| Imprint | Vintage |
| Cover | Paperback |
| Pages | 240 |
| Language | English |
| Dewey | 814.6 (edition:23) |
| Readership | General – Trade / Code: K |