* Selected as ONE of the BEST BOOKS of the 21st CENTURY by The New York Times * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * New York magazine’s #1 Book of the Year * Best Book of the Year by: The Wall Street Journal; Vogue; O, The Oprah Magazine; Los Angeles Times; The San Francisco Chronicle; The New Yorker; Time; Flavorwire; Salon; Slate; The Daily Beast “Superb…Scintillatingly alive…A pure explosion of now.”—The New Yorker Reno, so-called because of the place of her birth, comes to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity—artists colonize a deserted and industrial SoHo, stage actions in the East Village, blur the line between life and art. Reno is submitted to a sentimental education of sorts—by dreamers, poseurs, and raconteurs in New York and by radicals in Italy, where she goes with her lover to meet his estranged and formidable family. Ardent, vulnerable, and bold, Reno is a fiercely memorable observer, superbly realized by Rachel Kushner.

Flamethrowers set the stage for a lot of what NUBClub has been: spirited disagreement. Essentially, the debate revolved around how you felt about the main character. Essentially, Kushner's novel looks at groups of people who are boldly and recklessly tear at the world around them, whether they be Italian leftist or New York artists. She's relentless in showing both their brilliance and destructiveness, and the novel expresses a velocity and power that keeps its momentum going. But the book does this through a kind of machoness that is embodied in all of the characters, notably the main lover Sandro. And that means that Reno, the protagonist, is at the receiving end of a lot of this masculine energy. This is where NUBClub disagreed. The people who liked the book thought Reno was an interesting character, a quiet artist drawn to the passionate and destructive, embodied in her love of motorcycles and racing. Detractors did not see that complexity and instead saw Reno as a cipher, a kind of punching bag the men of the novel could use to show how brilliant and mean they were. If you didn't find Reno an interesting character, the book just seemed really self-indulgent and pointless. So essentially, how we felt about Kushner's novel was a question of how we saw the main character. If you find Reno interesting, then the book takes you on a powerful tour of the intersection of art and destruction; if not, you just suffer through watching her get pushed around by arrogant men.