Rachel Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. 2013's The Flamethrowers received rave reviews across the country, and Kushner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, Cabinet, and Grand Street. As New York Magazine says, “Kushner thinks, talks, and even writes like a visual artist: performative statements of purpose in place of irony or self-deprecation; allusions and digressions that break up her narratives with patches of abstraction; accounts of raw experience — backwoods skiing, illegal motorcycle racing, preteen drug use — that betray a strikingly earnest romanticism about the radicals and misfits with whom she identifies.”