RaveChicago Review of BooksFrom the first time I read Rachel Kushner’s novels, I thought about nonfiction. The biting yet elegant voices of her narrators reminded me of literary criticism, and the detailed renderings of people and places I thought resembled journalism ... The Hard Crowd collects writing that Kushner has done outside of her career as a novelist, and in doing so fleshes out the story of how Kushner the novelist came to be. The Hard Crowd will doubtlessly appeal to fans of her fiction, especially because the writing often explicitly deals with the novels, photographs, and movies that inspired her own work. But the book’s appeal is not limited to existing fans, or even readers who share her interests; Kushner can spin a compelling story out of the most esoteric subjects or minute details ... writing for her is a process of capturing on the page some of the liveliness of the people she admires ... Although the dominant mode of The Hard Crowd is reflective, it also paints Kushner as a writer attuned to the present, even the future. The Hard Crowd is an engaging collection that demonstrates Kushner’s skill at weaving together the anecdotes, personalities, art, and literature she has absorbed through her life.
Jo Ann Beard
RaveThe Chicago Review of Books... despite these differences in form, each piece feels like it belongs to a category of writing that is uniquely Beard’s own ... it is ironic that in sum, \'Festival Days\' communicates this joy less so than other pieces in the collection...The essay captures Beard’s own grief, but what’s missing from the essay is a precise picture of the friend she’s losing: we never learn what type of writing Kathy does, for instance, or what drew her to India in the first place. Moreover, Beard’s gaze, carefully calibrated to the natural beauty and social tensions of American college towns, wavers when it comes to rendering India. The descriptions too closely resemble comments that uncomfortable Americans write on travel websites: the animals on the street are starving, the men are intimidating, the women are beautiful. I wondered, when reading the essay, if the two problems were related: if Beard was unable to explain what their last trip meant to Kathy because she failed to see India through her friend’s eyes ... The misstep of Festival Days is only worth mentioning because it is the one previously unpublished piece in the collection. Otherwise, the collection as a whole is remarkable. In other collections, I often find that in bringing different forms together, an author sacrifices the cohesion of their book. In Festival Days on the other hand, the disparateness of the pieces highlights the consistency of Beard’s style. Beard renders the boring and the everyday in the same vivid language as the violent and the truly awful. In the end, Beard’s writing bounds over literary questions of fiction versus nonfiction. Her essays instead resemble forms plucked from life itself: eulogies, stories told around a fire, narratives of our own lives that echo in our heads.
