Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forward 50 2018

Rachel Kushner

Man Booker Shortlisted Author And ‘Girl Citizen’

Speaking to The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear this spring, the novelist Rachel Kushner explained that she thought of herself as a “girl citizen.” Kushner was soon to publish her third novel, “The Mars Room,” which is set inside a California women’s prison. She’d spent a good deal of time at one such prison, the Central California Women’s Facility, while researching the book. Even after the novel’s completion, as Goodyear wrote, Kushner made regular visits to see the inmates with whom she had formed the deepest connections, and advocated for them from the outside.

“The Mars Room” was a success, ending up on the shortlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize. With it, Kushner, 50 and already a respected writer, entered a new sphere of literary fame. (Part of that fame: Following Masha Gessen (2017) she was dubbed the Forward’s 2018 Sexiest Jewish Intellectual Alive.) In doing so as a “girl citizen,” she quietly proposed a model of literary prowess somewhat in opposition to that which has recently dominated American letters. For at least the last half century, the literary world has often, not without a certain snobbishness, suggested that for writers, craft and rigor must come before an effort to be just. Kushner is one of a number of ascendant writers challenging that model.

“I am slouching toward the contemporary, and this book is my take, I guess, on both where we are as a society and what I think a contemporary novel might look like,” Kushner told The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. The contemporary novel, if she is right, will be a work of technical brilliance that is profoundly concerned with the implications of the story it tells. It’s not fiction as social justice. It’s fiction informed by deep engagement with the world of its subject. Per Kushner’s account, “The Mars Room” was informed by six years of in-person research in California’s prisons, courts, jails and criminological institutions. The model of writing as the product of painstaking hours alone in a study need not apply.

As Kushner observed to Treisman, each of her novels has moved forward in history. Her first was set in Cuba in the 1950s, her second in New York and Italy in the 1970s. “The Mars Room” is set in the early 2000s, which brings Kushner nearly to the present. In a fraught political and social landscape, as American literature undergoes a generational shift, the moment she next observes will be a telling one. The literary world — and more tellingly, those outside of its mainstream — will be waiting.

— Talya Zax

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.