“All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom.”

American writer

Rachel Kushner is an American writer known for her novels Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers, The Mars Room, and Creation Lake. Her fiction includes Telex from Cuba, published in 2008, The Flamethrowers, published in 2013, The Mars Room, published in 2018, and Creation Lake, published in 2024. These works established her reputation as a novelist whose name is closely tied to contemporary American fiction.