Details

ISBN-10: 1476756589
ISBN-13: 9781476756585
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Publish Date: 05/07/2019
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.80" W, 0.80" H

The Mars Room

Paperback

Price: $17.00

Overview

TIME‘S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR – NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the 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).

Read More
Reviews
"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

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 1476756589
ISBN-13: 9781476756585
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Publish Date: 05/07/2019
Dimensions: 8.50" L, 5.80" W, 0.80" H
Skip to content