The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner
Scribner Book Company
 9781476756554
1-4767-5655-4

From twice National Book Awardnominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly.

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compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.Its 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Womens Correctional Facility, deep in Californias Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushners work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive. Kushner is going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom well be needing in hard times to come. She is a novelist of the very first order. Robert Stone Kushner is a young master. I honestly dont know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way. George Saunders