Contents:
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. Get a FREE e-book by joining our mailing list today! Plus, receive recommendations for your next Book Club read. By clicking 'Sign me up' I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the privacy policy and terms of use.
Free eBook offer available to NEW subscribers only. Must redeem within 90 days. See full terms and conditions and this month's choices. She lives in Los Angeles. 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: 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.
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 …. 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. It is also an uncannily perceptive portrait of our culture—psychologically and philosophically astute, candid about class, art, sex and the position of women—with a deadly accuracy that recalls the young Joan Didion , and that, despite the precisely rendered historical backdrop, gives the story a timeless urgency.
Adroitly balancing astringent social critique with deep soundings of the complex psyches of her intriguing characters, Kushner has forged an incandescently detailed, cosmopolitan, and propulsively dramatic tale of creativity and destruction.
The sentences are sharp and gorgeously made. The scope is wide. I was faced with the pleasure and headache of somehow stitching together the pistols and the nude women as defining features of a fictional realm, and one in which the female narrator, who has the last word, and technically all words, is nevertheless continually overrun, effaced, and silenced by the very masculine world of the novel she inhabits—a contra- diction I had to navigate, just as I had to find a way to merge what were by nature static and iconic images into a stream of life, real narrative life.
As I wrote, events from my time, my life, began to echo those in the book, as if I were inside a game of call and response. As I wrote about riots, they were exploding in Greece. As I wrote about looting, it was rampant in London. The Occupy movement was born on the University of California campuses, and then reborn as a worldwide phenomenon, and by the time I needed to describe the effects of tear gas for a novel about the s, all I had to do was watch live feeds from Oakland, California.
As I was working on the novel, I encountered a woman who was friends with the only Situationist not expelled by Debord, the enigmatic, infamous Gianfranco Sanguinetti. Also, a filmic fact: Before he was married to Sherman, Auder had been with Viva, the Warhol superstar. An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost.
By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash.
This twelve-minute record is a montage of sound effects—mostly breaking glass, pouring rain, and thunder. Goldstein had all the right ingredients for myth: He was hugely influential but ended up living in a trailer in East L. He died in , and so his body of work is now, sadly, a bounded set. William Eggleston, Stranded in Canton , , still from a black-and-white videotape, 77 minutes. Larry Fink, Black Mask , , black-and-white photograph, 11" x 14". Danny Lyon, 88 Gold Street detail , , black-and-white photograph, dimensions variable.
The Flamethrowers is a novel by American author Rachel Kushner. The book was released on April 2, through Scribner. The Flamethrowers follows . The Flamethrowers has ratings and reviews. Justin said: Much of this book just isn't very good, indeed, it's quite bad. Much of this book is.
The same year that Larry Fink photographed Black Mask on Wall Street, Danny Lyon methodically captured with a view camera the vast demolition of Lower Manhattan, much of it coming down for the construction of the Twin Towers. Factories and warehouses to be replaced by finance, which gives literal shape to a significant transformation of the seventies: Andy Warhol, Screen Test: Virginia Tusi , , still from a silent black-and-white film in 16mm, 4 minutes at 16 frames per second.
No one seems to know. When those were combined into one person, such as Edie Sedgwick, bliss.
One of the more striking men that Warhol filmed in was in the audience when I saw a program of Screen Tests last year. This man, a beard now tumbling down his chin, big belly protruding from his open blazer, shared anecdotes.
The New York Review of Books wrote a predominantly negative review in which it criticized elements of the book as unconvincing. Book ideas for upcoming months. Apr 05, Jan Rice rated it liked it Shelves: Be a conduit…I felt this to be true. No clue but a Kodak color bar, which was no clue at all. Feels like it needed another one or two good edits before publishing to smooth out the ride.
China girls, whose faces were used to adjust color densities in film processing, were mostly secretaries who worked in the film labs—regular women who appeared on leader that was distributed all over the world. And if you did see her, she flashed by so quickly she was only a quick blur. They were ubiquitous and yet invisible, a thing in the margin that was central to each film, these nameless women that, as legend has it, were traded among film technicians and projectionists like baseball cards. Lozano was a tough and uncompromising person, celebrated by her male contemporaries for her conceptually driven paintings and the way she collapsed art into life.
She had a solo show at the Whitney in In , for her piece Decide to Boycott Women , she did just that: Allen Ginsberg, Sandro Chia detail , , black-and-white photograph, 11" x 14". The artist Sandro Chia had been firing at targets with Burroughs in Rhinebeck, New York, when this photograph was taken.
The sweet innocence of the McLuhan seventies. By the s, when I was a teenager, I carried around a copy of Subliminal Seduction: The culture by that point was already using the ability to decode to sell us to ourselves in even more effective ways. Even as sex was, is, and will be one of the few things people can do to each other for free.
David Salle, The Coffee Drinkers , , black-and-white photograph with affixed product advertisement, one of four panels, each 20" x 16". Something feminine, calming, pure? Modernism, as painless as modernism looks but never is. The link between violence and modernism is everywhere but too broad to get into in the form of a caption. Enrico Castellani, a younger contemporary of Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, was the first person in Italy targeted in the massive sweep of arrests in the seventies.
Castellani seems to have circulated among leftists.