They're off...

“The inaugural shortlist of the latest literary award on the block, the Folio Prize, has been unveiled - with a strong showing by American authors.

     The prize, open to English-language writers from all around the world, pre-empts this year's Booker Prize, which is also expanding to a global level.
     The final eight books - out of 80 read by the Folio judges - span poetry, novels and short stories.
     The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on 10 March.
     On the shortlist are Red Doc by Anne Carson, Schroder by Amity Gaige, Last Friends by Jane Gardam, Benediction by Kent Haruf and The Flame Throwers by Rachel Kushner.
     The list is completed by A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride, A Naked Singularity by Sergio De La Pava and Tenth of December by George Saunders. Five of the writers - Gaige, Haruf, Kushner, De La Pava and Saunders - are American or US-based. Gardam is the only English writer on the list. Carson is Canadian, and McBride is Irish.”
— Tim Masters, BBC
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“[…] the fine lubricated violence of an internal combustion engine.”

“Rachel Kushner’s second novel, The Flamethrowers, unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember. It plays out as if on Imax, or simply higher-grade film stock.

     In part this is a function of the novel’s unfamiliar settings, including the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where the book’s young narrator briefly becomes, as one character puts it, 'the fastest chick in the world.' The book also touches down in politically turbulent Italy in the 1970s.
     In part it’s the simple fact that Ms. Kushner can really write. Her prose has a poise and wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone and Joan Didion.
     This wariness lurks beneath a sensibility that’s on constant alert for crazy, sensual, often ravaged beauty. This is a novel in which a fish’s head on a plate resembles ‘a shorn airplane fuselage.’ An auburn beard tumbles down a man’s chin ‘like hillside erosion.’”
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
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