Rachel Kushner, "The Mars Room"

Rachel Kushner discusses her novel, "The Mars Room", at Politics and Prose on 5/7/2018.

A fearless and powerful writer, Kushner made her literary debut with Telex from Cuba, a vivid look at the lives of Americans in Havana on the eve of the 1958 revolution. Her follow-up, The Flamethrowers, was an incandescent story of a woman infatuated by motorcycles and art. Her new novel is a stunning depiction of a women’s prison. Told from the perspective of several characters—prisoners, staff, and victims—the narrative centers on Romy Hall, a twentynine-year-old single mother sentenced to two consecutive life sentences for killing her stalker. Because she’d worked as a lap dancer, her jaded public defender believed she would hurt her case if she testified, so her story never came out in court. It comes out brilliantly here, and Kushner lays bare the reality of mass incarceration and the culture of inequality that supports it.

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Produced by Tom Warren