The Flamethrowers - Hardcover

Kushner, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1439142009 ISBN 13: 9781439142004

Publisher: Scribner, 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:

"Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel."--Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia

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

"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 "

"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 "

"[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 white-hot ember of a book..."--David Ulin "The Los Angeles Times "

"Electric...addictive...smart and satisfying."--Kristy Davis "O, the Oprah magazine "

"The Flamethrowers not only harnesses the energies of violent Italian politics; it also converts the intensity of radical New York visual art into shining, whirling prose."--Jimmy So "The Daily Beast "

"Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist."--Jonathan Franzen, author of Freedom

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: Scribner
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1439142009
• ISBN 13: 9781439142004
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 383