Books by Rachel Kushner

From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a wildly original first essay collection about living fast and free in a crowded worldIn her twenties Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love - motorbikes - to compete in the notorious and deadly race, ...Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 80mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life.The Hard Crowd is a white-knuckle ride through that life; a book about muscling your way through, finding your own path and, as she says in the hair-raising opening essay, 'completing the ride without dying'. Charged with hot-blooded humanity - with anger against the world's cruelties, and a free-wheeling passion for rare people, machines, movies, music, art and writing - it is an electrifying work about a woman's determination to reach the finish line.
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I was inspired by the way a car can steal the show. Think of iconic car chases in films- it's often about spectacle, and has little to do with advancing a narrative. And that's the way I think of these cars, as dead-end technologies, but also as high-performance machines which, f...or their audience, sought to reflect the spirit and attitudes of their time. -Matthew Porter Matthew Porter presents a portfolio of twenty-five images of old-school cars, captured in midair as they careen over city streets and highway intersections. Each photograph is a freeze-frame-a hypothetical film still from a pulp-fiction chase scene. The series seems, on one hand, to distill the essence of muscle-car Americana, a pop-cultural semaphore for the high-testosterone male persona. And yet, on the other, the subject-the all-American muscle car as antihero-is caught in an eternal state of suspended animation, while the various elements of the landscape in the background organize themselves around the edges of the frame. The resulting pictures are a hybrid of hyperreality and studied, topographic description, part bittersweet nostalgia and part ironic reinvention of a classic American trope.
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The San Quentin Project collects a largely unseen visual record of daily life inside one of America's oldest and largest prisons, demonstrating the experience of incarceration and how this penal institution of the state is now being used to teach visual literacy.

The year is 1977 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. This book tells her story.

Fidel and Raul Castro are in the hills, descending only to burn sugarcane plantations and recruit rebels. Rachel K is in Havana's Cabaret Tokio, entangled with a French agitator trying to escape his shameful past.