Rent The Flamethrowers: A Novel

Synopsis

Now in paperback, the New York Times bestseller and most highly acclaimed novel of Spring 2013, the "scintillatingly alive" (James Wood, The New Yorker) story of a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s—"electric, addictive, smart, and satisfying" (O, The Oprah Magazine).

The year is 1975 and Reno—so-called because of the place of her birth—has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in that world—artists have colonized a deserted and industrial SoHo and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, she begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the estranged scion of an Italian tire and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow.

The Flamethrowers is "a high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit" (The Washington Post), "a brilliant lightning bolt of a novel" (NPR), and an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist. At its center is author Rachel Kushner's superbly realized protagonist, a young woman on the verge. Thrilling and fearless, this is a major American novel from a writer of spectacular talent and imagination. It "unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember" (Dwight Garner, The New York Times).

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