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Jon Wiener: The Palestinian refugee camp you wrote about in
The Hard Crowd, Shuafat, is not in Gaza, or Southern Lebanon; it’s inside Jerusalem. You visited in 2016 when something called the Knife Intifada was going on, but your report is about ordinary life for Palestinian refugees at that time and in that place. What’s going on now in Israel and Palestine is so much worse when you were in Shuafat, Israeli planes were not bombing Gaza and killing children Israeli forces had not attacked the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, at the end of Ramadan, and injured hundreds of Palestinians. I almost said that, when you were in Shuafat in 2016, things were “more peaceful” but that’s not
‘The Hard Crowd’ Reveals Rachel Kushner s Literary Life Through Death
Her latest book, a collection of 19 essays that spans art criticism, journalism and memoir, is an exhaustive examination of what it means to write
‘Neither tragic nor legendary, I myself will never die,’ writes Rachel Kushner in ‘Made to Burn’. She means that no one will write about her death. Her subjects, though – the rough-housers, activists, nihilists and stoics that people her first nonfiction collection,
The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000–
2020 (Simon & Schuster, 2021) – are another story. Her dope-using neighbours from the Tenderloin in San Francisco are dead. So are the bartenders and regulars at the Blue Lamp, a dive where she poured drinks before she moved to New York to be a real writer. Her father-in-law, a lifelong trucker, died at 48, and his trucker brother died, too, still trying to shift gears on his gurney: their deaths haunt the kindness of strangers she encount
Listen Live
Weekly Links to streaming book and theatre events.
Bay Area Book Festival Richard Flanagan, Thursday June 3, 7 pm. See website for streaming events from the 2021 festival
Books Inc Stacey Abrams, May 13, 6 pm. Jhumpa Lahiri, May 18, 6 pm; Rachel Kushner, May 20, 5 pm; Michael Lewis, May 20, 6 pm. Andy Weir, May 27, 5 pm.
Book Passage. Ian Manuel, May 16, 4 pm. Neal Allen with Anne Lamott, May 27, 5 pm.
The Booksmith The Bindery has moved to 1727 Haight Street in San Francisco. Lilly Dancyger with Alia Volz, May 13, 6 pm.
In Saturdayâs Irish Times, we publish Dirty Linen: a personal history of Northern Ireland, a revised version of my contribution to The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, edited by Paul McVeigh, to be published by Unbound in July.
Reviews are Diarmaid Ferriter on The Partition: Ireland Divided, 1885-1925 by Charles Townshend Louise Kennedy on Real Estate by Deborah Levy; Claire Hennessy on the best new YA fiction; Sarah Moss on Snowflake by Louise Nealon; Paschal Donohoe on Together: 10 Choices for a Better Now Ece Temelkuran; Sarah Gilmartin on The Rules of Revelation by Lisa McInerney; Anna Carey on The Beauty of Impossible Things by Rachel Donohue; Paul Gillespie on State and Nation in the United Kingdom: The Fractured Union by Michael Keating; and Houman Barekast on Intimacies by Lucy Caldwell.