Audiobooks narrated by Rachel Kushner

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–2020

Brought to you by Penguin. A wildly original first essay collection from the bestselling, Booker Prize-shortlisted author of The Mars Room In her twenties Rachel Kushner went to Mexico in pursuit of her first love - motorbikes - to compete in the notorious and deadly race, Cabo 1000. As fellow racers died on the roadside, bikes were stolen and friends abandoned one another in the heat of the chase, she crashed at 130mph and miraculously survived; soon after, she decided to leave her controlling boyfriend and manoeuvred her way into a freer new life. The Hard Crowd is a white-knuckle ride through that life; a book about muscling your way through, finding your own path and, as she says in the hair-raising opening piece, 'completing the ride without dying'. In nineteen razor-sharp essays she explores friendship, loss, social justice, art and more, taking us into the world of truckers, a Palestinian refugee camp, the American prison system and the San Francisco music scene, via the work of Jeff Koons, Marguerite Duras and the Rolling Stones. Fearless and bold, The Hard Crowd is an electrifying book about living fast and free in a crowded world. © Rachel Kushner 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Rachel Kushner (Author), Rachel Kushner (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic

A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamilia Shamsie and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio's The Decameron. When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it. In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote "The Decameron": one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction? These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamila Shamsie and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory. Table of Contents: "Preface" by Caitlin Roper "Introduction" by Rivka Galchen "Recognition" by Victor LaValle "A Blue Sky Like This" by Mona Awad "The Walk" by Kamila Shamsie "Tales from the LA River" by Colm Tóibín "Clinical Notes" by Liz Moore "The Team" by Tommy Orange "The Rock" by Leila Slimani "Impatient Griselda" by Margaret Atwood "Under the Magnolia" by Yiyun Li "Outside" by Etgar Keret "Keepsakes" by Andrew O'Hagan "The Girl with the Big Red Suitcase" by Rachel Kushner "The Morningside" by Téa Obreht "Screen Time" by Alejandro Zambra "How We Used to Play" by Dinaw Mengestu "Line 19 Woodstock/Glisan" by Karen Russell "If Wishes Was Horses" by David Mitchell "Systems" by Charles Yu "The Perfect Travel Buddy" by Paolo Giordano "An Obliging Robber" by Mia Cuoto "Sleep" by Uzodinma Iweala "Prudent Girls" by Rivers Solomon "That Time at My Brother's Wedding" by Laila Lalami "A Time of Death, The Death of Time" by Julián Fuks "The Cellar" by Dina Nayeli "Origin Story" by Matthew Baker "To the Wall" by Esi Edugyan "Barcelona: Open City" by John Wray "One Thing" by Edwidge Danticat

Tbd (Author), Alex Allwine, Alexandra Allwine, David Mitchell, Deepti Gupta, Dennis Boutsikaris, Edwidge Danticat, Kevin R. Free, Lameece Issaq, Matthew Lloyd Davies, Rachel Kushner, Rebecca Lowman, Robin Miles, Tommy Orange, Uzodinma Iweala (Narrator)

Audiobook

HiBrow: The Folio Prize Fiction Festival

The three-day 'The Folio Prize Fiction Festival 2014' brought together some great writers and audiences and gave them a real opportunitey to talk in depth about their work and similar subjects. The festival included interviews and discussions with top writers, novelists, poets, critics and publishers, including Eimear McBride, Paul Baggaley, Sergio De La Pava, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Hall, Pankaj Mishra, Stephanie Merritt, Jane Gardam, Mark Haddon

Eimear Mcbride, Jane Gardam, Mark Haddon, Pankaj Mishra, Paul Baggaley, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Hall, Sergio De La Pava, Stephanie Merritt (Author), Eimear Mcbride, Jane Gardam, Mark Haddon, Pankaj Mishra, Paul Baggaley, Rachel Kushner, Sarah Hall, Sergio De La Pava, Stephanie Merritt (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Mars Room

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Mars Room, written and read by Rachel Kushner. **SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018** **A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER** 'An unforgettable novel.' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'More knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black]... so powerful.' NEW YORK TIMES 'One of America's finest writers.' VOGUE Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy's estranged mother. Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner details with humour and precision. Daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewage pipes. Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line - until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy - and through a cast of astonishing characters populating TheMars Room - Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex.

Rachel Kushner (Author), Rachel Kushner (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Mars Room: A Novel

FEATURING ORIGINAL MUSIC BY SONIC YOUTH'S KIM GORDON! From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's 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 Kushner's 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."

Rachel Kushner (Author), Rachel Kushner (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Rachel Kushner