Rachel Kushner is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers. She lives in Los Angeles.One of her influences is the American novelist Don DeLillo.
The Four Spent the Day Together (2025) Chris Kraus "The intelligence and honesty and total originality of Chris Kraus make her work not just great but indispensable...I read everything Chris Kraus writes; she softens despair with her brightness, and with incredible humor, too."
Audition (2025) Katie Kitamura "Katie Kitamura is a dizzyingly skilled writer whose fictions always seem to manage two contradictory effects: a supple seductive surface, under which the chaos of minds and repressed realities roil. She's an original, building an entire metier of her own."
Denial (2022) Jon Raymond "The future is so painful to think about, and yet I was totally hooked into Jon Raymond's rendition of it in Denial, set in 2052: a world with new-fangled exhaustless cars but old philosophical quandaries, and older rituals: the bullfight, the scapegoat, the love interest. I blew through this book too quickly, but will be thinking about it for a long time to come."
Trust (2022) Hernán Diaz "Diaz understands, and deeply, how strange money is, as an omnipotent and imaginary substance that controls our lives. Trust glints with wonder and knowledge and mystery. Its plotlines are as etched and surreal as Art Deco geometry, while inside that architecture are people who feel appallingly real. This novel is very classical and very original: Balzac would be proud, but so would Borges."
Virtue (2021) Hermione Hoby "Hermione Hoby has a a high-wire command of language and a sensitivity for conjuring facets of being that I never knew could be described until I read Virtue."
The Mysteries (2021) Marisa Silver "Marisa Silver uses language as she would a sharp needle: to stitch, and to puncture, in her examination of people who are as vivid and anxious as the tragic souls of Richard Yates."
Daddy (2020) Emma Cline "When I read Emma Cline I think of Mary Gaitskill's psychological acuity and of Joy Williams's sardonic gravitas. And yet something about Cline's intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own."
The Topeka School (2019) Ben Lerner "Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new... He is one of my favourite living writers."
Vengeance (2018) Zachary Lazar "The state of Louisiana is the world's incarceration capital and Zachary Lazar, a resident of New Orleans, is a world-class novelist, who brings humility and sensitivity to this new book. The urgency of Lazar's subject, combined with his graceful submission to it, makes Vengeance incredibly timely, and also timeless in its value as art."
Moving Kings (2017) Joshua Cohen "Joshua Cohen is a blacksmith who heats, hammers, and molds the language to sharpest, most precise points—not for the sake of craft, but to tell a troubled story about troubled life in the twenty-first century. This is a dazzling and poignant book."
(b.1968)
