The Flamethrowers - Softcover

Kushner, Rachel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846557925 ISBN 13: 9781846557927

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2013

Synopsis

Named a Best Book of 2013 by The New York Times; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Time; Bookish; New York magazine; The New Yorker; Slate; Flavorwire; Publishers Weekly; Kirkus Reviews; Salon; and Complex.

Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award, was just named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine's top ten fiction books. Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, was also a finalist for a National Book Award and was reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. The Flamethrowers, even more ambitious and brilliant, is the riveting story of a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s--by turns underground, elite, and dangerous.

The year is 1975 and Reno--so-called because of the place of her birth--has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world--artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo, are staging actions in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.

The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is Kushner's brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination.

About this title

Review:

I loved Rachel Kushner s The Flamethrowers. --Jonathan Franzen "The New York Times Book Review ""

Rachel Kushner s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers. --Elissa Schappell "Vanity Fair ""

Rachel Kushner s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story it manifests itself as a pure explosion of now: it catches us in its mobile, flashing present, which is the living reality it conjures on the page at the moment we are reading Kushner employs a[n] eerie confidence throughout her novel, which constantly entwines the invented with the real, and she often uses the power of invention to give her fiction the authenticity of the reportorial, the solidity of the historical Kushner watches the New York art world of the late seventies with sardonic precision and lancing humor, using Reno s reportorial hospitality to fill her pages with lively portraits and outrageous cameos [Kushner s] novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. On the contrary, it succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive. --James Wood "The New Yorker ""

The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of .Robert Stone and Joan Didion [Kushner has] a sensibility that s on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty persuasive and moving provocative. --Dwight Garner "The New York Times ""

Life, gazed at with exemplary intensity over hundreds of pages and thousands of sentences precision-etched with detail that s what The Flamethrowers feels like. That s what it is. And it could scarcely be better. The Flamethrowers is a political novel, a feminist novel, a sexy novel, and a kind of thriller Virtually every page contains a paragraph that merits and rewards rereading."--Tom Bissell "Harper s ""

Rachel Kushner s new novel, The Flamethrowers, is a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit. On lines stretched tight between satire and eulogy, she strolls above the self-absorbed terrain of the New York art scene in the 1970s, providing a vision alternately intimate and elevated [Kushner is] a superb recent-historical novelist 20 brilliant pages [of The Flamethrowers] could make any writer s career a set piece of New York night life that s a daze of comedy, poignancy and violence What really dazzles is her ability to steer this zigzag plot so expertly that she can let it spin out of control now and then The Flamethrowers concludes with two astonishing scenes: one all black, one all white, as striking as any of the desert photographs Reno aspires to shoot, but infinitely richer and more evocative. Hang on: This is a trip you don t want to miss. --Ron Charles "The Washington Post ""

[A] big, rich wonder of a novel [Kushner s] polychrome sentences are shot through with all the longing and regret you find in those of Thomas Pynchon, whose influence is all over this novel a glittering, grave, brutally unsentimental book that s spectacularly written enough to touch greatness. --Craig Seligman "Bloomberg News ""

Exhilarating it s impossible not to be pulled in by the author s sense of the period s vitality the novel s brilliance is in its understanding of art s relationship to risk, and in its portrait of Reno s and New York s age of innocence. --Megan O Grady "Vogue ""

[A] brilliant lightning bolt of a novel The Flamethrowers is an entire world, intimately and convincingly observed, filled with characters whose desires feel true. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion, and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency. --Maud Newton "NPR ""

Brilliant and exhilarating Kushner fearlessly tackles art, death, and social unrest. In so doing, she has written the sort of relentless and immersive novel that forces the reader to look up and make sure the room hasn t disappeared around her. --Eugenia Williamson "The Boston Globe ""

Book Description:

An extraordinarily ambitious big American novel about a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s - by turns underground, elite, dangerous

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1846557925
• ISBN 13: 9781846557927
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400