Rachel Kushner’s The Hard Crowd collects twenty years of essays on topics ranging from motorcycle racing to Marguerite Duras, from the itinerant poets who populated her bohemian parents’ world to the rough-edged social scene she inhabited as a young adult in San Francisco.

While Kushner consciously avoids didacticism, her work repeatedly alights on political themes, whether it’s Italian ultraleftism in the turbulent ’70s, as in her novel The Flamethrowers; mass incarceration in California, as in her novel The Mars Room; or Palestinian life in a refugee camp in Jerusalem, as in The Hard Crowd.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Kushner about bourgeois writing and its discontents, the intrigue of Italian autonomism, Israel’s humiliation of the Palestinians, the successes and failures of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the revolutionary spirit of the George Floyd uprising.