#the flamethrowers

[litsnaps]

[quotespile]

It was not the case that one thing morphed into another, child into woman. You remained the person you were before things happened to you. The person you were when you thought a small cut string could determine the course of a year. You also became the person to whom certain things happened. Who passed into the realm where you no longer questioned the notion of being trapped in one form. You took on that form, that identity, hoped for its recognition from others, hoped someone would love it and you.

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

[philosophybitmaps]

[themindisapowerfulmotif]

1. Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers // 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

[quotessentially]

From Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers

[possible-streetwear]

1986

[coldfruits]

“I had not kissed him but I knew I would, and he knew that I knew, and there was a kind of mutual joy in this slide into inevitability.”

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

[newyorker]

Rachel Kushner’s Immersive Fiction

The novelist has entered the worlds of seventies New York and pre-revolutionary Cuba. For her new book, “The Mars Room,” she explored life inside a California women’s prison.

Several years ago, the novelist Rachel Kushner followed an inmate at New Folsom Prison, in Sacramento, into his cell. A former Los Angeles police officer, he was serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for working as a contract killer. Kushner, seeking to learn about the prison system, had come with a criminology professor and his students, but, as the group continued down the hall, she stayed behind, and the prisoner told her about his crimes—the ones he was in for and those which had never been found out. His complexion was ghoulishly youthful, undamaged by the sun: dirty cops don’t dare go on the yard. On the cell walls Kushner glimpsed pictures of Harley-Davidsons, relics of a former life. In the five minutes she was alone with him, she told me, “I just felt his person, like he went into my skin. You get a whiff of somebody’s essence, whether you wanted it or not, and that’s enough to write a whole character.”

Read more.