Rachel Kushner is a novelist of the very first order. She's going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. In this extremely bold, swashbuckling novel, romantic and disillusioned at once, intellectually daring and even subversive, Rachel Kushner has created the most beguiling American ingnue abroad, well, maybe ever: Daisy Miller as a sharply observant yet vulnerable Reno-raised motorcycle racer and aspiring artist, set loose in gritty 70s New York and the Italy of the Red Brigades., The controlled intensity and perception in Rachel Kushner's novels mark her as one of the most brilliant writers of the oncoming century. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination. At its center is Kushner's brilliantly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.
When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in the seventies. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. 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. 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. The Flamethrowers, even more ambitious and brilliant, is the riveting story of a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s-by turns underground, elite, and dangerous. Kushner's first novel, Telex from Cuba, was also a finalist for a National Book Award and was reviewed on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award, was just named a Top Ten Book of 2013 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time magazine's top ten fiction books.
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