From the Booker-shortlisted author of The Mars Room, a career-spanning collection of spectacular essays about politics and culture.In The Hard Crowd, Rachel Kushner gathers a selection of her writing from over the course of the last twenty years that addresses the most pressing political, artistic, and cultural issues of our times - and illuminates the themes and real-life terrain that underpin her fiction.In razor-sharp essays spanning literary journalism, memoir, cultural criticism, and writing about art and literature, Kushner takes us from Jeff Koons and Marguerite Duras to a Palestinian refugee camp, from her love of classic cars to her young life in the music scene of San Francisco. The closing, eponymous essay is her manifesto on nostalgia, doom, and writing.''I''m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart'' Olivia Laing''Wild, wide-ranging and unsparingly intelligent throughout'' Vogue''An exciting book... Kushner writes from the inside out and gives us the true story, the real deal'' Kevin Barry, New Statesman, Books of the Year