Rachel Kushner in conversation with Dana Spiotta celebrating the launch of Rachel Kushner's "The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020," published by Scribner. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by Peter Maravelis.

You can purchase copies of "The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020" directly from City Lights here: https://citylights.com/new-nonfiction-in-hardcover/hard-crowd-essays-2000-to-2020/

Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of three novels: the Booker- and NBCC Award–shortlisted "The Mars Room;" "The Flamethrowers," a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times top ten book of 2013; and "Telex from Cuba," a finalist for the National Book Award. She grew up in San Francisco and now lives in Los Angeles.

Dana Spiotta is is the author of four novels: "Innocents and Others,"(2016), which won the St. Francis College Literary Prize and was shortlisted for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize; "Stone Arabia" (2011), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist in fiction; "Eat the Document" (2006), which was a National Book Award Finalist in fiction and a recipient of the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and "Lightning Field" (2001). Spiotta was a Guggenheim Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, and she won the 2008-9 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded her the John Updike Prize in Literature. Spiotta lives in Syracuse and teaches in the Syracuse University MFA program.

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation: citylights.com/foundation