April 13th: Rachel Kushner in Conversation with Ben Lerner

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Rachel Kushner will discuss her new book The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020 with Ben Lerner.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Tuesday, April 13th at 6pm EST. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.

Rachel Kushner — The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020 (Scribner, 2021)

Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today” (Michael Lindgren, The Millions) and 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 times—and 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. “Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.”

Rachel Kushner is the best-selling author of three novels: the Booker- and NBCC Award–shortlisted The Mars Room; The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award. She grew up in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles.

Ben Lerner’s most recent book is the novel The Topeka School. A book of prose poems with images by Barbara Bloom will appear this fall.