Author Rachel Kushner has been a finalist for the National Book Award twice and is a recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. Her award-winning first novel, Telex from Cuba, was a New York Times bestseller and her second novel, The Flamethrowers, was named one of the Top Ten Books of 2013 by the New York Times. Novelist Karen Russell said "The Flamethrowers lives up to its incendiary title — it is a brilliant, startling, truly revolutionary book…" In addition her fiction and essays appear regularly in the New York Times, The Paris Review, The Believer, Artforum, Bookforum, Fence, Bomb, and Grand Street. Her novels and essays explore contemporary art, culture, revolutionary politics, modernism, and feminism.

[source: Rochester Arts & Lectures series website, 2015-Apr-13]