Published in 2016
432 pages
Rachel Kushner is the only writer to ever be nominated for a National Book Award in Fiction for both a first and second novel. She began her Bachelor’s in Political Economy at the University of California, Berkeley when she was only sixteen and went on to obtain an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. She published her first novel, Telex from Cuba, in 2008. Kushner has edited for Grand Street Magazine, BOMB, Soft Targets, and Artforum, among others. Her fiction and essays can be found in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review, and frequently focus on issues of feminism, contemporary art, revolutionary politics, culture, and modernism. In 2013 New York Magazine called Kushner’s second book, The Flamethrowers, “probably the most heatedly discussed book of the year.” For this title Kushner was a finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tate Black Prize, and the Bailey’s Prize. She was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2013 as well as an honorary PhD from Kalamazoo College. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.
What is this book about?
In a small but comfortable conference room, in a publishing house in San Francisco, a group of high school students met weekly over the past year to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. They had some good times. There was a whiteboard in the conference room, and often cartoons were drawn on this whiteboard. The cartoons were of varying quality. By the end of the year, with the help of a similar committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, and their guest editor, Rachel Kushner, they selected the contents of this anthology. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 features stories about Bulgarian spaceships, psychedelic mushroom therapy, and a cyclorama in Iowa. If you don’t know what a cyclorama is, you aren’t alone. Read on to find out.
The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 includes N. R. KLEINFIELD, ANNA KOVATCHEVA, DAN HOY, ANTHONY MARRA, MICHAEL POLLAN, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, DANA SPIOTTA, ADRIAN TOMINE, INARA VERZEMNIEKS and others
Rachel Kushner, guest editor, is the author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and one of the New York Times’s top five novels of 2013. Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, a winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.
