When Rachel Kushner’s debut novel Telex from Cuba was published in 2008, it garnered the kind of attention few debut novelists might hope for: it was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and an instant New York Times Bestseller, and was praised by her literary heroes Don DeLillo and Robert Stone. Drawing on deep historical research and firsthand immersion, Kushner’s early work announced a writer committed to examining power, ideology, and rebellion at the margins of empire.
Telex from Cuba, set among American expatriates in pre-revolutionary Cuba, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. The novel established Kushner’s signature approach: historically grounded fiction that interrogates American imperialism, class struggle, and the collision between personal desire and political violence.
Her second novel, The Flamethrowers (2013), propelled her to international prominence. A finalist for the National Book Award and the Folio Prize, the novel ranges from the New York art world of the 1970s to labor unrest in Italy, weaving together radical politics, avant-garde art, feminism, and capitalism’s aesthetics of speed and power. Widely hailed as one of the most important novels of its decade, The Flamethrowers was named one of The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of the Year and later included in multiple lists of the best novels of the 21st century.
Kushner’s third novel, The Mars Room (2018), marked a sharp turn toward the contemporary American carceral state, with an approach merging gravitas and deep humor, a style that has anchored all of her fiction since. Set largely in a California women’s prison, the novel explores incarceration, the verve and resourcefulness of people subjected to structural violence, Dostoyevskian lives that are meant to be erased, but who rise on the pages of Kushner’s novel with stunning clarity. The Mars Room was reviewed on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and debuted at number four on the New York Times Bestseller list. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Prix Médicis in France, further cementing Kushner’s reputation as a novelist unafraid to confront systems of punishment and control, as well as received notions of innocence and guilt, while never sacrificing moral complexity nor her right to lcoate beauty and humor in even the most dire of places.
Her most recent novel, Creation Lake (2024), expands her range into politically charged speculative and philosophical territory. The novel examines eco-radicalism, the great mystery of human origins, cave art, surveillance, and ideological commitment through the lens of a morally ambiguous protagonist embedded in a shadowy activist movement. With Creation Lake, Kushner continues her sustained inquiry into resistance, belief, and the costs of living outside dominant systems. Creation Lake was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of Der Spiegel’s inaugural 2025 book prize, honoring the best book published in Germany, in any language.
In addition to her novels, Kushner is the author of The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020 (2021), a wide-ranging collection that brings together two decades of reporting and criticism on politics, literature, art, incarceration, and social movements, as well as vivid personal reflections, which bookend the collection, and appeared respectively in Harper’s and the New Yorker. Her reporting for the New York Times Magazine on mass incarceration and on Palestine have been widely anthologized, as well as taught on university syllabi. For two years she was a staff columnist for Harper’s “Easy Chair” feature, and continues to write long reported pieces for Harper’s, including a recent twelve thousand word essay on the history of hot rodding in America, investigating social class, heritage, family, and the question of who we are if we don’t understand the technology we use. Such a masculine topic was followed by her long essay in the New Yorker’s most recent fashion issue, on clothes, childhood longing, and female aspiration. Regardless of topic, her nonfiction is marked by intellectual rigor, narrative force, and a resistance to moral simplification.
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