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Let's discuss THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner

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Let's discuss THE FLAMETHROWERS by Rachel Kushner

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Set in New York, the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah and in politically turbulent Italy of the 1970s, this is a coming-of-age novel that examines speed and sex, the feminine and the fake, terrorism and the politics of fear, art and intellect, and what is real and not real -- all in brilliant language. The narrator is a woman in her early 20s (Reno) who comes to New York to turn her fascination with motorcycles into an art career. Critic James Wood from The New Yorker calls it "a contemporary rewriting of Flaubert's novel of 1969, "Sentimental Education" because both protagonists are infatuated by older men, and both books offer dense pictures of cities riven by political protest.

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