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Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Mars Room, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Award, winner of the Prix Médicis, selected by the National Book Foundation for its “Literature for Justice” award, and a winner of the California Book Award. She has received grants and prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine. Her latest book, The Hard Crowd, spans literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature. In brand-new essays and re-worked older pieces, Kushner explores topics and subjects ranging among Jeff Koons, Denis Johnson, Marguerite Duras, a Palestinian refugee camp, an illegal motorcycle race down the Baja Peninsula, 1970s wildcat strikes in Fiat factories, her love of classic cars, and her young life in the music scene of her hometown, San Francisco.
Heidi Julavits is the founding editor of Believer magazine, and the author of four novels, including The Vanishers and The Uses of Enchantment. Her fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope All-Story and elsewhere. She is a professor of creative writing at Columbia University.