I sense that she wouldn’t consider herself an “L.A. writer.” (Raised in the Pacific Northwest, she received her MFA at Columbia and lived many years in New York. I think she identifies with it as an L.A. “Rachel has always been into car/bike culture,” Lutz, the LARB editor, told me earlier this week in a phone interview. (Both Kushner and NYRB editor Bob Silvers are traveling and couldn’t comment.) There is nothing quite so explicitly regional in Miriello’s rebuttal, but consider that he’s responding in the Los Angeles Review of Books to a New York-based poet writing in the New York Review of Books about an L.A.-based novelist's latest book, which, though for large stretches based in New York, undeniably crackles-particularly in scenes based in the Nevada desert-with the western flair of an Ed Ruscha work. Seidel, who lives in New York, wrote that “the novel too often sounds like the stylized voice-over narration of film noir, sardonic, self-conscious, very American, the sound of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity”-California references, all. (Apr.But the offense may have been less literary than coastal. Kushner’s psychological explorations of her characters are incisive, the novel is peppered with subtle ’70s details, and it bursts with you-are-there depictions of its time and places. Snippets from the life of Sandro’s father’s run in intriguing contrast to Reno’s story, presenting his WWI experiences, childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, and the founding of his company. Distraught, she flees with Valera family servant Gianni to Rome, where she discovers Gianni is involved with a volatile protest movement. She risks alienating the Valeras by going to their factory to film labor unrest, only to catch Sandro there in flagrante delicto with his cousin Talia. Soon they are romantically entwined, and Reno accompanies Sandro on a visit home to Italy. A flashback to New York finds her mixing with a group of artists, among whom she meets Sandro Valera, whose wealthy family manufactures the Moto Valera. Reno is a young filmmaker “shopping for experiences,” who, as the novel opens, is attempting to set a land-speed record on her Moto Valera motorcycle in Nevada, only to crash instead. This rich second novel from Kushner (Telex from Cuba) takes place in late-’70s New York City and Italy.

The flamethrowers book