Rachel Kushner: I am writing for pleasure

Wed, 15 May 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers has been widely lauded for its ambition, intensity, and surprising moments of humor. She recently pulled off the rare New York Times trifecta: A Books of the Times review, a Sunday Book Review, and an author profile. In many respects a bildungsroman about a young artist named Reno, The Flamethrowers effortlessly spans a wide range of times and places — a proto-Futurist movement in 1910s Italy, the New York City art scene of the 1970s, and a landspeed trial on the Bonneville Salt Flats, to name a few. I recently emailed with Kushner about initiations and introductions, Clarice Lispector, challenges to the nature and status of work, politics in art, and writing about the American West.

Eugenides on Denis Johnson: “Blistering, brilliant”

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:01:00 +0000

A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write.

How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing.

If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story — and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, "Jesus’ Son" — Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting, characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself.

Salon.com > Denis Johnson

Rachel Kushner: I am writing for pleasure

Eugenides on Denis Johnson: “Blistering, brilliant”