';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 timesand 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 motorcyc
