From the Academy

The Academy is a great store of knowledge and opinion about great books. From time to time we ask its members to write a short piece on books they have admired. Here are some of their responses, most recently about 2015 Folio Prize winner Akhil Sharma’s Family Life, and further back about the one book they would have liked to win the Prize if it had always existed.

Ben Lerner on Rachel Kushner

flamethrowers pbKushner subtly organizes her brilliant novel around the evolving (or devolving) avant-garde dream of dissolving the distinction between art and life, and she deftly situates that dream in the historical context of 20th-century fascism, capitalism, and anti-capitalist political struggle. Kushner’s remarkable blending of personal and transpersonal histories and her beautiful, charged prose keep the book from ever feeling sententious. She has produced a compelling dramatization of what remains a central problematic for contemporary art and artists.