“I have spent a lot of time listening to people who are serving life sentences and getting to know them and the circumstances of their lives. I have never met anyone serving a long prison sentence who had anything close to what I could call a childhood; instead, the upbringings always - always - involve extreme situations of poverty and abuse.”

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.