Chapters: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner March 2025
Mars Room by Rachel Kushner March 11th @7:15pm
The Mars Room by
ISBN: 9781476756554Publication Date: 2018-05-01TIME'S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood--"gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled"--and from Stephen King--"The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny." 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."
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About the Author
Rachel Kushner is the author of the novels CREATION LAKE, THE MARS ROOM, THE FLAMETHROWERS, and TELEX FROM CUBA, a book of short stories, THE STRANGE CASE OF RACHEL K, and THE HARD CROWD: ESSAYS 2000-2020. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages. Her fiction has been published in the New Yorker and the Paris Review, and her nonfiction in Harpers and the New York Times Magazine.
New Yorker profile by Dana Goodyear
New York Times profile by Maria Russo
New York Magazine profile by Boris Kachka
Videos with the Author
Articles and Reviews
- Rachel Kushner’s ‘The Mars Room’ Offers Big Ideas in Close QuartersBy Dwight Garner
New York Times
April 23, 2018 - The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner review – what it means to be poor and female in AmericaThe Guardian
Lisa Allardice
20 Jun 2018