num_pages: 272
description: A career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and cultureRachel Kushner has established herself as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd she 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 timesand illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.In nineteen razor-sharp essays The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism memoir cultural criticism and writing about art and literature including pieces on Jeff Koons Denis Johnson and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories her love of classic cars and her young life in the music scene of her hometown San Francisco. The closing eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia doom and writing.These pieces new and old are electric phosphorescently vivid and wry and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers.
language: English
title: The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
publisher: Scribner