Kushner is the champion of something strange, wonderful and real.

— Rivka Galchen
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Portrait of Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, the short story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K, and a book of essays, The Hard Crowd. Her new novel, Creation Lake, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, the Folio, was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction and the Booker Prize, and winner of the Prix Médicis étranger. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into 29 languages.

cover of the book The Strange Case of Rachel K

The Strange Case of Rachel K

by Rachel Kushner

The three pieces gathered in The Strange Case of Rachel K roughly map the genesis of Rachel Kushner’s fiction. From the fate of a conquistador in “The Great Exception,” to the illegal radio broadcasts and then bombs in “Debouchment,” to a Havana courtesan’s “strange” case, these stories build into a vision of Cuba that is black-humored, brutal, and beautiful.

In this collection, which “overflows in atmosphere as it shows off the burgeoning talent of one of our best writers” (NPR), Rachel Kushner is forging her own original path into the wilds of contemporary fiction.

cover of the book Covert Joy: Selected Stories

Covert Joy: Selected Stories

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Katrina Dodson

With a contribution by Rachel Kushner

Here are twenty gems from the massive treasure house of Clarice Lispector's Complete Stories, named a best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, BBC, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, Boston Globe, and The San Francisco Chronicle.

cover of the book Malina

Malina

by Ingeborg Bachmann

Translated by Philip Boehm

With a contribution by Rachel Kushner

In Malina, originally published in German in 1971, Ingeborg Bachmann invites the reader into a world stretched to the very limits of language. An unnamed narrator, a writer in Vienna, is torn between two men: viewed through the tilting prism of obsession, she travels further into her own madness, anxiety, and genius. Malina explores love, “deathstyles,” the roots of fascism, and passion.

“Fascism is the first thing in the relationship between a man and a woman, and I attempted to say that here in this society there is always war. There isn’t war and peace, there’s only war."—Ingeborg Bachmann

Kushner is the champion of something strange, wonderful and real.

— Rivka Galchen

Full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.

— James Wood, The New Yorker

Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in the mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.

— Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

Kushner’s writing is fluid and clear and possesses a rhythm as determined as an ocean current. Readers will encounter three stories of terrific depth.

— Publishers Weekly

The title story is a bitter and perfumed prose study in sensuality and brutal compromise with life’s harsh demands.

— Alan Cheuse, NPR

Kushner’s writing is fluid and clear and possesses a rhythm as determined as an ocean current. In this slim book, readers will encounter three stories of terrific depth.

— Publishers Weekly

The Kushner of The Strange Case of Rachel K is interested primarily in myth, sex, epistemology and rhetoric, the boundaries of what can be known and how, the female and male gaze, and infinity.

— Gavin Tomson, Highway Magazine

There’s a quality of iridescence to Kushner’s writing. Many of the passages are multi-colored: tilted one way you see one colour, tilted another the colour changes.

— Hermione Hoby, The Guardian

Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.

— Dwight Gardner, New York Times Book Review

Kushner is a vivid storyteller.

— David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
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