The Hard Crowd

Essays 2000-2020

By: Rachel Kushner

Narrated by: Rachel Kushner

AUDIO EXCLUSIVE: INCLUDES GALAXIE 500’S SONG “ANOTHER DAY!”

“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” —Taylor Antrim, Vogue

From a writer celebrated for her “chops, ambition, and killer instinct” (John Powers, Fresh Air), a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.

Rachel Kushner has established herself as “the most vital and interesting American novelist working today” (The Millions) and as a master of the essay form. In The Hard Crowd, she gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times—and illuminates the themes and real-life experiences that inform her fiction.

In nineteen razor-sharp essays, The Hard Crowd spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, including pieces on Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, and Marguerite Duras. Kushner takes us on a journey through a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.

These pieces, new and old, are electric, vivid, and wry, and they provide an opportunity to witness the evolution and range of one of our most dazzling and fearless writers. “Kushner writes with startling detail, imagination, and gallows humor,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly, and, from Paula McLain in the Wall Street Journal: “The authority and precision of Kushner’s writing is impressive, but it’s the gorgeous ferocity that will stick with me.”

Critic reviews

"Rachel Kushner narrates these essays precisely and warmly. Her voice, assured and practiced, moves the text along. An admired novelist, she's a fine storyteller who uses pace well. She gives life to the many real-life characters—artists, writers, activists, daredevils—who fill this audiobook."

Stellar

One by one all of the West Coast and East Coast scenesters of the late 20th and early 21st centuries drop away, but still standing there is Rachel Kushner deeply understanding the art and music and literature and ideas of our time. This book is smart, accessible, and positioned at the intersection of low and high cultures. Reading it, you kind of… Get a little masters degree in cultural studies, while also getting a glimpse into the real life of maybe the coolest writer going. Kushner‘s personal revelations make me want to go back and work longer as a bartender, stay out of grad school, live an independent life and be on the scene. Really, this is a thrilling book. And I think Rachel Kushner is my new favorite writer.

Reading & Listening

To read Kushner is to give her a voice in your head pieced together from the style and tone of her prose. To listen is to be given her voice.

Motorcycles, babes, bars and music ...

nice stories and a barfly's fantasy barmaid serving them up. I'll leave the literary criticism to our more erudite listeners ha ha

Incandescent

I didn’t love the narration (by the author) at first, but after half an hour or so it started to feel like the comfortably tense intimacy of an author reading in the upstairs of a little bookshop. The rhythms of the writing and the voice suit each other perfectly, how could they not?

Rachel Kushner is an astonishingly good stylist, and that’s as true here as it is in her novels. The prose is flat, even, objective, and precise—most journalistic. But there is always a sense of burning love and strongly held conviction holding up the carefully controlled even tone.

The highlights for me were Not With The Band and The Hard Crowd. I love places because I love Place, and these essays are in competition mostly with Dubliners for the best short-form evocation of Place and Time. In this case the San Francisco of the 80s and 90s.

I’m glad she became a novelist, but she would have been an incredible critic or journalist had she chosen.

Excellent

Rachel Kushner is one of my favorite authors - I have listened to The Flamethrowers, Telex From Cuba, and just before The Hard Crowd, I listened to The Mars Room. I really enjoyed TMR and some of the essays in THC were so deep I listened twice. What a wonderful thing to have such a good book read by the author. I usually listen to books at 1.25 or 1.5, but for all of the books she read I kept it at normal 1.0.