Rachel Kushner

Early life

Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, the daughter of two scientists whom she describes as "deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation." Her mother arranged afterschool work for her straightening and alphabetizing books at a feminist bookstore when she was five years old, and Kusher says "it was instilled in me that I was going to be a writer of some kind from a young age." Kushner moved with her family to San Francisco in 1979.

When she was sixteen she began her Bachelor's in Political Economy at UC Berkeley with an emphasis on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Kusher lived as an exchange student in Italy when she was eighteen; and upon completing her Bachelor of Arts, Kushner lived in San Francisco, worked at nightclubs, rode a Moto Guzzi, and then decided to become serious about writing. At twenty-six she enrolled in the fiction program at Columbia University and she earned her MFA in creative writing in 2000.

Journalism

After completing her MFA, Kushner lived in New York City for 8 years, where she was an editor at Grand Street and BOMB. She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in Artforum. She is currently an editor of Soft Targets, praised by The New York Times as an "excellent, Brooklyn-based journal of art, fiction and poetry."

Controversies

In May 2015, PEN American Center gave its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, most of whose staff had been murdered by Al Queda terrorists in Paris. To protest Charlie Hebdo receiving this award, Ms Kushner withdrew her support from the PEN gala. She was one of several authors to do so, the others being Michael Ondaatje, Peter Carey, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, and Taiye Selasi. Kushner criticized the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and support for “a kind of forced secular view,” an accusation that was denounced by numerous commentators.

Salman Rushdie criticized Kushner and her fellow protesters as "fellow travelers" of "fanatical Islam", saying: “This issue has nothing to do with an oppressed and disadvantaged minority. It has everything to do with the battle against fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non Muslims, into a cowed silence. These six writers have made themselves the fellow travelers of that project.

Writing about the issue in The Nation, Katha Pollitt pointed out that "Many of the writers targeted by fundamentalists have been Muslim themselves, among them the Bangladeshi writer and feminist Taslima Nasreen, the Saudi blogger Raif Badawi condemned by the regime to 1,000 lashes, and, going back a bit in time, the Nobel Prize–winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, thousands of Algerian intellectuals and doubtless many more. These attacks had nothing to do with supposedly racist insults from privileged white people, and everything to do with perceived deviations from orthodoxy."

During the same week as the PEN/Charlie Hebdo controversy, Islamist militants armed with AK-47's launched an attack on an art exhibit at the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland, Texas.

Novels

Kushner's most recent novel, The Flamethrowers, was published by Scribner in April 2013. Vanity Fair hailed it for its "blazing prose," which "ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground." In The New Yorker, critic James Wood praised the book as "scintillatingly alive. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story... It succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive." The Flamethrowers was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award. "The Flamethrowers" was named a top book of 2013 by New York Magazine, Time Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue, Wall Street Journal, Salon, Slate, Daily Beast, Flavorwire, The Millions, The Jewish Daily Forward, and Austin American-Statesman.

Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, was published by Scribner in July 2008. She got the idea for her novel after completing her MFA in 2000, and she made three long trips to Cuba over the six years it took her to write the book. Telex from Cuba was the cover review of the July 6, 2008 issue of The New York Times Book Review, where it was described as a "multi-layered and absorbing" novel whose "sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution's causes." Telex from Cuba was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Kushner's editor is Nan Graham.

Awards and honors