Gosh Rachel Kushner is cool, and what a life she has lived, as is often the case with anyone who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area! It's not a prerequisite for an accomplished author to have an interesting personal life but in the case of Kushner, it seems that both her imagination and lived experience has informed her excellent offerings in fiction (Telex From Cuba, The Flamethrowers & The Mars Room). I was very keen to read this collection of 19 essays of criticism and memoir from a journalism career spanning two decades from 2000-2020. With topics spanning the gamut from writers like Denis Johnson and Marguerite Duras to auto worker strikes, life on two wheels on the open road in Baja or the music scene that raised her in San Francisco, this is a truly lush offering of tales of life at the margins with an underlying misfit sensibility. Highly recommend reading anything that Rachel Kushner writes, whether fiction or non.