People like Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner (born 1968) is an American writer, known for her novels Telex from Cuba (2008), The Flamethrowers (2013), and The Mars Room (2018).

Kushner was born in Eugene, Oregon, the daughter of two Communist scientists, one Jewish and one Unitarian, whom she has called "deeply unconventional people from the beatnik generation." Her mother arranged after-school work for her straightening and alphabetizing books at a feminist bookstore when she was 5 years old, and Kushner says "it was instilled in me that I was going to be a writer of some kind from a young age." Kushner moved with her family to San Francisco in 1979.

When she was 16, she began her bachelor's degree in political economy at the University of California, Berkeley with an emphasis on United States foreign policy in Latin America. Kushner lived as an exchange student in Italy when she was 18; upon completing her Bachelor of Arts, she lived in San Francisco, working at nightclubs. At 26, she enrolled in the fiction program at Columbia University and earned a MFA in creative writing in 2000. One of her influences is the American novelist Don DeLillo.