SPEAKER: RACHEL KUSHNER

Rachel Kushner's first two novels, The Flamethrowers (2013) and Telex from Cuba (2008), were both New York Times bestsellers and finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction. The Mars Room has been an international bestseller, a finalist for the Mann Booker Prize, and winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis Etranger. Her most recent book, The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020, was published in spring 2021. Her books are translated into 26 languages. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and lives in Los Angeles.

James Wood is Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard. He has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007. In 2009, he won the National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism. His critical essays are collected in The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Fun Stuff: And Other Essays. He is also the author of two novels The Book Against God and Upstate, and a study of technique in the novel, How Fiction Works. His most recent book, Serious Noticing: Selected Essays, 1997-2019, collects the best essays from his career into one definitive volume.

About the Series

Writers Speak, a series of literary conversations at the Mahindra Humanities Center started by Claire Messud in 2016, is convened by Duncan White, Associate Director of Studies in History & Literature at Harvard University.