Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner is an American novelist and journalist born on January 1, 1968, in Eugene, who writes in American English.
Kushner attended George Washington High School before studying at the University of California, Berkeley, and later at Columbia University and Columbia University School of the Arts. Her first novel, Telex from Cuba, appeared in 2008, followed by The Flamethrowers in 2013, The Mars Room in 2018, and Creation Lake in 2024. Alongside this fiction, she has worked as a journalist, and her writing has earned her recognition that includes a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Prix Médicis étranger.
The novel form sits at the center of her output, and her four novels — Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room, and Creation Lake — mark the main arc of her career as a writer of American English fiction.
Quotes by Rachel Kushner
The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects.
Flamethrowers have been used by many armies in many wars, including by American Marines in Korea and Vietnam. They cause horrific deaths and are thus a serious public-relations liability. The U.S. military apparently phased them out in 1978.
I'm very interested in the idea of a large group of people who come together quite suddenly, but not illogically, for reasons that could not have been anticipated.
The social dimension of the art world is fascinating to me, but I also want to entertain the reader, so I will let a character say something funny.
I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
I'm not the kind of person who would want to go into a studio and manage other people and listen to the phone ringing. That's alien to me.
I don't have any outside view of myself, and if I did, I would probably be creatively inhibited. I just write in the way that I write.
For me, art is not 'brooding.' It comes from someplace that is more fun and that has a kind of electricity to it.