“ The Flamethrowers unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. 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 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…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… novel is an achievement precisely because it resists either paranoid connectedness or knowing universalism. “Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, is scintillatingly alive, and also alive to artifice.
“Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground of The Flamethrowers.”
“ I loved Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.” Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner. 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. 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, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. “Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”- The New Yorker 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
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