Genre Fiction
![Rachel Kushner - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B001JS1P24.jpg)
The Flamethrowers
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * New York magazine's #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of 2013 by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker; Time; Flavorwire; Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast
"Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now."-The New Yorker
Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity-artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts-by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
"Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now."-The New Yorker
Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity-artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts-by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.
Editorial Reviews
"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 super...
"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 super...
Readers Top Reviews
Jim Andrewsxercron
The seller deserves absolutely no critiscism. The book was not at all what I expected and I tred but gave in half way through.
Mme Suzanne Lageard
I identified with the narrator in this book, which made me appreciate her story. She is a young artist, full of doubts and unsure of herself, who embarks on a relationship with an older, confident man. There are moments where she follows her own desires instead of his, though what he, and the rest of the world, thinks of her is clearly important enough in her eyes to make her act differently. I found this book very realistic; though now I may frown upon this kind of dependence on others, I remember all too well a time when I would have done the same. For me, the first three-quarters of the book were the best. I found the end, which takes place in Italy, confusing and bizarre, and didn't gain much from it. The book is well writing, which saves it from its lack of plot.
Italophilerashbre
Having enjoyed Ms Kushner's Telex from Cuba, I was looking forward to reading The Flamethrowers. Instead I was left wondering what was the point of the book, which seemed diffuse and overlong - I was reading it on Kindle and was surprised that it was only 400 paper pages. Was she trying to establish a link between the Futurists and the Warhol group in New York in the seventies? Was she writing a satire - my first reaction when she brought in characters from an activist group called the M*****f*****s? Well it isn't funny (to me, at least) and I have now discovered that such a group actually existed in New York - so the book taught me something! I was left with the impression that her publisher had asked her to write a 400 page book, and she more or less threw the kitchen sink at achieving this objective.
Cliente de Kindlejul
While this author has wonderful flashes of insight on human nature and a gorgeous turn of phrase, there is basically no plot, nothing moving the "story" along, and no character development. I wish I could write like she does, but she needs to find an actual story to tell.
