Rachel Kushner's Reading List

"Duras’s favourite authors were Proust, Ecclesiastes, and Marguerite Duras. I think those three are largely what she read. She also liked the screenplay of the great French film by Jean Eustache, The Mother and the Whore . She had a way of making declarations with a flair for the absolute. Here is a favourite, from Practicalities : “You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.” And another: “You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond. You have to be very fond of them to love them. Otherwise, they’re simply unbearable.” “It’s a “telling” of life, about life. A reflection.” The book is unique and fits in no genre except maybe one formed by its inclusion with Proust, Ecclesiastes, The Mother and the Whore , and the rest of the books written by Duras. It’s a “telling” of life, about life. A reflection. In one case, it is a list of items MD thinks any woman ought to have in her pantry. It veers into a page of discomfiting homophobia, my least favorite part, but that doesn’t disqualify the book for me. People are complicated. Duras, when she wrote this (or “told” it) was in a multi-year relationship with a gay man, Yann Andrea, and, according to her various biographers, angry and hurt that he did not love her in an erotic manner."

"Nancy is a continental French philosopher perhaps best known, outside of circles of philosophy and theory, for his essay “ L’intrus ,” about his heart transplant, which was in a sense “adapted” by Claire Denis as a film. This little book, like“L’intrus” is very accessible. The four dialogues on the weighty topics in the title were actually dialogues with children, that took place in Montrieux. Nancy says some wonderful things about God. At one point, in answer to a child’s question, he suggests that Heaven starts very down low, down here, he says, and signals to just above the ground. This was a life-changing moment for me, to read that. And I had never really understood the lex talionis , the way in which it is meant to moderate, to limit to merely one eye, until I read this book. I reread it all the time. It is simple in the way that simplicity can hold a richness that a very intricate argument might not. It is on my desk right now, in fact."

"This novel taught me, early on, about hyperbole. The sardonic and paranoid narrator describes the tunnels in the ground left by felled trees, as he travels in French colonial Africa this way: “Whole Metro trains could have manoeuvred with ease in the hollows left by their roots.” When I read that for the first time I took it as a lesson and challenge, about description, accuracy, truth, and the powers of exaggeration to produce humour. I re-read that section of that book all the time."

"I only read this for the first time while writing The Mars Room . I would work every morning and sit in a chair and read The Brothers Karamazov every afternoon. It infused me with a sense of the magical world of Russia in a way that no other Dostoyevsky novel ever had, even as I love many of his works. Somehow, the way that Russia is not part of the Occident, the way that it is full of incredible art, music, traditions, tragedies, just clobbered me. In a good way. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The long section by the Grand Inquisitor was a useful demonstration of novelistic ambition, and the refusal of compromise. But most importantly, I was shattered, and also rebuilt, by Alyosha’s “talk by the stone,” when he tells the children around him to remember how good and earnest they feel, and to save and hold that feeling. It taught me something I knew on a much deeper level but did not have the language or the reasoning to state: that innocence is something very durable and interior, and also evanescent."

"I found this novel on a shelf in a library in Italy a couple of summers ago, and read it because I saw that it takes place in San Francisco, where I’m from. The story is about an alcoholic who works various throwaway jobs as a fry cook at greasy diners downtown, on Market Street, an area I know very, very well. He meets a miserable alcoholic lady who sort of reminds me of the tragic dame in that movie The Hustler , with Paul Newman. The woman who scrawls her suicide note to Newman on a mirror, with lipstick. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Anyhow these two drunks live, barely, drinking and fighting, and then at the end, Willeford reveals a shocking detail that recasts the entire narrative in a new light. It’s not a brilliant ending but it is a very compelling, weird little book, hidden inside the genre of the dimestore novel. I loved The Sellout by Paul Beatty for its wicked humor. Every joke in it smelled like the truth to me, in the way the joke produced shock: not in order to shock, but in order to refuse to comfort and appease. I’m reading Lost Illusions . Balzac does cruelty really, really, really well. The cruelty of the father exploiting his own son for his retirement is pretty breathtaking. Balzac did not believe in capitalism, clearly … I’m reading the following books that have to do with a specific interest: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind , Julian Jaynes Luminous Debris , Gustaf Sobin Juniper Fuse , Clayton Eshleman The Neanderthal Legacy , Paul Mellars Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari Who We Are and How We Got Here , David Reich The Mayor of Casterbridge , Thomas Hardy"

"An incredible document, amazingly told and structured. Tough, but riveting."

"I also recently read Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow and can't quit promoting it."

"That and Golden Gulag, by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, are important books that assess with deep and careful thought how we came to be a society of mass incarceration."

"Currently I'm deep in Kippenberger: The Artist and His Families, in this manner. It's very good."

"I used to read Morvern Callar, by Alan Warner, every year — I adored that book."

"Ingrid Caven, by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation."

"I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history."

"Kingdom of This World, about the Haitian Revolution, is a singular work of art."

"Ariana Reines is something special, and her book Mercury is a shining achievement. I revere it."

"Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is without question the book that made me want to try to be a fiction writer as an actual serious undertaking."

"I have grown deeply impressed by the verve and erudition of The Recognitions, by William Gaddis."

"I loved Island of the Blue Dolphins, Julie of the Wolves and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books."

"I remember being obsessed with My Antonia, by Willa Cather."

"Supposedly I went into my room with Alice in Wonderland, which was given to me when I was 5, and didn't come out until I was done."