- Published: 3 February 2014
- ISBN: 9780099586982
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 400
- RRP: $24.99
The Flamethrowers
- Published: 3 February 2014
- ISBN: 9780099586982
- Imprint: Vintage
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 400
- RRP: $24.99
Scintillatingly alive... It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures
James Wood, New Yorker
One of the most thrilling and high-octane literary experiences I have had in ages
Colum McCann, Sunday Independent
It's so good, it's a little frightening… it makes any fretting over the state of the novel look plain silly
Guardian
Unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember
New York Times
Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist
Jonathan Franzen
An ambitious and serious American novel. The sentences are sharp and gorgeously made. The scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace
Colm Tóibín
An adrenalin-fuelled coming-of-age novel
Sunday Telegraph
Dazzling... The Flamethrowers is a virtuoso performance; a ride of ache and pleasure, handled with pinpoint command
The Times
This glittering novel is both carefully structured and exhilarating
Daily Telegraph
Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground
Vanity Fair
A bright burning flame of a novel
Spectator
The Flamethrowers is a strange, fascinating beast of a novel, brimming with ideas, and sustained by the muscular propulsion of Kushner’s prose… Kushner emerges as a wildly gifted artist filling a sketchbook with thrilling, eye-catching scenes
Robert Collins, Sunday Times
There is an exhilarating freedom to Kushner’s writing… Taut, vividly intelligent prose
David Wolf, Prospect
Sparky and inventive...a riot of a novel
Daily Mail
Ms Kushner’s kaleidoscopic prose carries the novel’s shifts in location and person, and the fast-paced rhythm harnesses the thrill of adventure
Economist
Swells with a daunting bravado
Irish Times
Oscillating between the hedonistic New York art world and Italy in the midst of the Years of Lead, The Flamethrowers is that rare thing, a novel that uses recent history not as a picturesque backdrop but as a way of interrogating the present. Kushner's urgent prose and psychological acuity make this one of the most compelling and enjoyable novels I've read this year
Hari Kunzru
The controlled intensity and perception in Rachel Kushner's novels mark her as one of the most brilliant writers of the new century. She's going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. Rachel Kushner is a novelist of the very first order. The Flamethrowers follows Telex from Cuba as a masterful work
Robert Stone
The Flamethrowers lives up to its incendiary title – it is a brilliant, startling truly revolutionary book about the New York art world of the seventies, Italian class warfare, and youth's blind acceleration into the unknown. Kushner is a genius prose stylist, and her Reno is one of the most fully realized protagonists I've ever encountered, moving fluidly from the fringe of the fringe movement to the center of the action. I want to recommend this stunning book to everyone I know
Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!
Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel.
Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia
A high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit... Hang on: this is a trip you don’t want to miss
Ron Charles, Washington Post
Wow! What a book! I'm eager for everyone I know to read it. It's an example of the very best in contemporary fiction…a contemporary masterpiece, and it wants you all to read it
Josh Ferris
A dazzlingly exciting novel... This is a deeply intelligent and engaging novel that uses all the virtues of old-fashioned storytelling to celebrate the triumphs and absurdities of new-fangled art
Jake Kerridge, Sunday Express
The Flamethrowers has gained praise from Jonathan Franzen and drawn comparisons with Patti Smith's Just Kids as it epically leaps between the New York art scene of the late 1970s and Italy in the midst of revolution... An essential summer read
Grazia
Exhilirating, psychologically complex, and perfectly intense, this is a thrilling contemporary novel likely to become a cultural touchstone
Flavorwire
A brilliant lightning bolt of a novel
Maud Newton, NPR
In this extremely bold, swashbuckling novel, romantic and disillusioned at once, intellectually daring and even subversive, Rachel Kushner has created the most beguiling American ingénue abroad, well, maybe ever: Daisy Miller as a sharply observant yet vulnerable Reno-raised motorcycle racer and aspiring artist, set loose in gritty 70s New York and the Italy of the Red Brigades
Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
Riveting
Time
Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers is remarkable for its expansiveness and for its exhilarating succession of ideas
Mark West, The List
National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner brings NYC's art scene to life so well in The Flamethrowers you could get high off the paint
Entertainment Weekly
Fast-paced, sexy and smart
Cosmopolitan
Electric...addictive...smart and satisfying
Oprah Magazine
Captivating and compelling
The Bookbag
This is a work of ferocious energy and imaginative verve, straining at the seams with ideas, riffs, jokes, set-pieces, belly-laughs, horror and heartbreak
Booktrust
Kushner writes with authority, passion and humour, her characters richly drawn and her story packed with delicious anecdotes and side lines from a wide array of memorable characters
Tracy Eynon, We Love This Book
Sexy and brilliant
Sunday Times Style
Incandescent
Image
Kushner's second novel comes loaded with recommendations and it's easy to see why…highly unusual and written with great seriousness and potency
Guardian
Kushner’s writing is a kind of marvel
Richard Fitzpatrick, Irish Examiner
A self-consciously cool mash-up of motorbikes, art and unpleasant Italian politics
Nick Curtis, Evening Standard
In fiction I enjoyed Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers for its style and its daring
Colm Toibin, Observer
This novel has undeniable force and power… it’s beautifully written
Tim Martin, Telegraph
It manages to relate the art scene in 1970s New York to the Red Brigades in Italy, with lots of motorbikes thrown in
Nick Barley, Herald
Kushner’s take on 1970s radicalism, art and politics is a big, absorbing read
Financial Times
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner manages to connect the art scene in New York in the 1970s with the Red Brigades in Italy, through the medium of motorcycles and drag car racing. Ambitious and beautifully written, it is one of the more surprising books I have read this year
Gordon Brewer, Scotsman
Introducing a fresh new voice
Justine Jordan, Guardian Online
You can feel the wind whipping through your hair, your pulse racing, as Kushner’s daring heroine, Reno, motorcycles across salt flats and down city streets, on the prowl for art, for love, for a cause
The Oprah Magazine
A left-field and potentially ludicrous literary concept – a multigenerational transcontinental historical epic built around a speed-freak biker heroine – is executed with élan by American novelist Rachel Kushner … Genius
Kevin Maher, The Times
The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces
New York Times
A Bildungsroman set against the violence of the 20th century, The Flamethrowers is less a litmus test for misogyny than a standard for the recent historical novel
Hannah Rosefield, Literary Review
It should've won the National Book Award... It is second to none
New York Magazine
Some of the prose is as thrilling as riding a motorbike on a mountain road with no lights
Nicky Dunne, Evening Standard
Has the kind of poise, wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone or Joan Didion
Dwight Garner, New York Times
For a while last spring it seemed like every single person I knew in New York was reading The Flamethrowers, which is normally enough to put me off a book, but in this case I did read it and found that its ubiquity was more than justified. Then in September I happened to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where one of its most memorable set-pieces takes place, and I wanted to read it all over again. If I say it captures a young woman's experience of the downtown art world in the 1970s, I'm going to make it sound boring, but in fact it's superbly enjoyable
Ned Beauman, Esquire
Much of what makes this book so magnificent is Kushner's astonishing observational powers; she seems to work with a muse and a nail gun, so surprisingly yet forcefully do her sentences pin reality to the page. I was pinned there too –– BEST BOOK OF 2013
Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine
A terrific, gripping, poetic book... Kushner's meandering plot and pacy pose has completely won me over
Thomas Quinn, Big Issue
Kushner’s prose dazzles with invention
Emily Rhodes, Spectator