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Rachel Kushner on Images

Author Rachel Kushner discusses her novel The Flamethrowers (now out in paperback), and the importance of images to her work, with The Quietus:

I’m inspired by visual art and film… Whether or not I’m writing about those mediums directly, as I sometimes do in Flamethrowers, I’m always thinking about images… I always wanted to have images in a book, and with [The Flamethrowers], after I got to have my choice of the image on the North American cover, I got a little bold, and asked about putting images inside. My editor said yes, so I quickly put together a short list of ideal visual passages. I didn’t want anything that would illustrate the narrative. I wanted, instead, images as kind of pauses, or counterpoints, but that would complicate, function in a relation, but not an obvious one. There’s a Richard Prince image, and he’s a shadow presence over the course of the book (one of the characters is also the name of Prince’s alter-ego, John Dogg). There’s a photograph by Aldo Bonasia, of a riot and police tear-gassing the rioters, in Italy. There’s a still from the movie Wanda, which figures in the book…

Funnily enough, I have feeling that Scribner have actually stuck closer to the hardcover for the front of the US paperback edition and slapped needless award stickers all over it, but I prefer the restraint of the version above left. The cover on the right is the UK paperback — a vast improvement on that mystifying hardcover).