The Hard Crowd: Everything is turning to gold
Book review: Enthralling collection of essays from the acclaimed novelist Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner: her daring exploits like someone’s cool older sister
As with so much of her fiction, Rachel Kushner’s new essay collection is concerned with liminal spaces and breakthroughs, outsiders who carve their own paths to embrace worlds that are exciting, sometimes terrifying, but always fascinating to encounter.
Girl on a Motorcycle, the opening story of The Hard Crowd, sets the tone as the author takes the reader on a hair-raising trip down the Baja Peninsula in Mexico where Kushner participates in the notorious Cabo 1000 motorcycle race: “At four thirty a.m. we were lined up in the dark parking lot of the Motel 6, all twenty-nine of us revving our engines like a swarm of angry bees.” It is a thrilling and intimate perspective from the life of a risk taker, akin to eavesdropping on the daring exploits of someone’s cool older sister.