Meet the latest cool, hip novelist everyone’s talking about, Rachel Kushner:
Kushner’s sympathies are with Occupy, and she says her next novel will be set in a present-day women’s prison. The Flamethrowers lays out a full spectrum of charismatic radicals: futurist proto-Fascists, Leninist Red Brigades, and the anarchist Motherfuckers, who rob banks, terrorize the Man, and feed the poor.
“That is something that’s more heroic, I think, than the violence that I imply vis-à-vis the Fascists, because there’s no way they’re going to overthrow the government.”
When I point out that they do kill someone, she responds, “Well, they stab a landlord, not a stranger. To them, a New York City landlord is a kind of Dickensian enemy.”
When her mother tells me Kushner is herself a landlord (renting out an L.A. duplex acquired with her first advance), Kushner explains that the tenants are former students of her husband.
