In Rachel Kushner's second novel, The Flame Throwers, set predominantly in 1970s downtown New York, a young and impressionable heroine, Reno, falls in with a  group of artists at the Helen Hellenberger Gallery, whose louche proprietor tends to take them to bed. The novel follows Reno through this bubble of artists and  performers, political dreamers and hangers-on, and then to Italy, where the Autonomist movement is raging. The psychological, sexual and artistic revolution with which New York had been flirting is suddenly and frighteningly actualized, and rebellion is no longer a thing to be performed.

Kushner will be joined in conversation by Joshua Ferris, author of And Then We Came To The End and The Unnamed.

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