The Mars Room: A Novel

Product Description TIME’S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR • NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018 FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and t he NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood—“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”—and from Stephen King—“The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.” It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, 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: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. 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, portrayed with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” ( The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” ( The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” ( Entertainment Weekly). Review “Like Denis Johnson in ‘Jesus’ Son,’ Kushner is on the lookout for bent moments of comic grace… The Mars Room is a major novel.”  —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Kushner uses the novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking.” —The New Yorker “[Rachel Kushner is] one of the most gifted novelists of her generation—on the same tier as Jennifer Egan and the two Jonathans, Franzen and Lethem…[ The Mars Room is] a page turner… blackly comic…It’s one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart.” —Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review (Cover Review) “ The Mars Room affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists…her stories slink in the margins, but they have the feel of something iconic.” —Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly “Kushner is a woman with the chops, ambition and killer instinct to rub shoulders with all those big, swinging male egos who routinely get worshipped as geniuses.” —John Powers, Fresh Air “[A] tough, prismatic and quite gripping novel…wholly authentic…profound…surprisingly luminous.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal "A disturbing and atmospheric book...Ms Kushner makes the prison, and the world beyond its walls, vivid."   —The Economist "A searing, tragic look at life in the prison-industrial complex, covering poverty, sex work, mass incarceration, education, trauma, suffering, love, and redemption. Somehow, Kushner's rapid-fire, imaginative prose makes it seems effortless.” —Vogue “Potent…an incendiary examination of flawed justice and the stacked deck of a system that entraps women who were born into poverty… The Mars Room is more than a novel; it’s an investigation, an exercise in empathy, an eyes-wide-open work of art.”  —Kelly Luce, Oprah “[An] electrifying take on the chaos of 1980s San Francisco.” —Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair “Phosphorescently vivid.” —Megan O’Grady, T Magazine “Superb and gritty… Kushner has an exceptional ability to be in the heads of her character." —Eve MacSweeney, Vogue "A powerful undertow pulls the reader through the book. I didn’t consume it so much as it consumed me, bite by bite..." —Laura Miller, Slate  "Kushner's characters are so authentic and vividly drawn that with each new novel, it’s easy to assume she’s tapped out. Y