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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled." - Margaret Atwood via Twitter "A page turner ... one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart." - The New York Times Book Review (cover review) "Brilliant and devastating ... a heartbreaking, true, and nearly flawless novel." - NPR "With her richly textured third novel, Kushner certifies her place as one of the great American novelists of the 21st century." - Entertainment Weekly From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine) , comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."



About the Author

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner's new novel, The Mars Room, debuted at # 4 on the New York Times bestseller list. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the California Book Award and the Prix Médicis in France. Her previous novel, the Flamethrowers, was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, the 2014 Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of the year by the New York Times. A book of early short fictions, The Strange Case of Rachel K, was published by New Directions in 2014. Her debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was reviewed on the cover of the NY Times Book Review and was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book. Kushner's fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and the Paris Review. She is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, and 2016 winner of the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Los Angeles.



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