Rachel Kushner

It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and...

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...

Rachel Kushner has written an astonishingly wise, ambitious, and riveting debut novel set in the American community in Cuba during the years leading up to Castro's revolution - a place that was a paradise for a time and for a few. Young Everly Lederer and K. C. Stites come of age in Oriente Province, where the Americans tend their own fiefdom. When the cane fields start to burn, K. C. and Everly begin to discover the brutality that keeps the colony...

"Celebrating Anne Truitt's centenary, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in her remarkable series of journals. In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to 'let the artist speak.' These writings...