Novels Kushner's first novel,
Telex from Cuba, was published by
Scribner in July 2008. She got the idea for her novel after completing her MFA in 2000, and she made three long trips to Cuba over the six years it took her to write the book.
Telex from Cuba was the cover review of the July 6, 2008 issue of
The New York Times Book Review, where it was described as a "multi-layered and absorbing" novel whose "sharp observations about human nature and colonialist bias provide a deep understanding of the revolution's causes."
Telex from Cuba was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. Kushner's editor is Nan Graham. Kushner's second novel,
The Flamethrowers, was published by
Scribner in April 2013.
Vanity Fair hailed it for its "blazing prose," which "ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground." In
The New Yorker, critic
James Wood praised the book as "scintillatingly alive. It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures: Kushner is never not telling a story... It succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."
The Flamethrowers was a finalist for the 2013
National Book Award, and it was named a top book of 2013 by
New York,
Time,
The New Yorker,
O, The Oprah Magazine,
The New York Times Book Review,
Los Angeles Times,
San Francisco Chronicle,
Vogue,
The Wall Street Journal,
Salon.com,
Slate,
The Daily Beast,
Flavorwire,
The Millions,
The Jewish Daily Forward, and
Austin American-Statesman. Kushner's third novel,
The Mars Room, was published by
Scribner in May 2018. In September 2018 it was shortlisted for the
Man Booker Prize. Her 2024 novel
Creation Lake was longlisted for the
Booker Prize, and then shortlisted by September 2024. It was also longlisted for the
National Book Award for Fiction.
Journalism After completing her MFA, Kushner lived in
New York City for eight years, where she was an editor at
Grand Street and
BOMB. She has written widely on contemporary art, including numerous features in
Artforum. In 2016, Kushner visited
Israel, as part of a project by the "
Breaking the Silence" organization, to write an article for a book on the
Israeli occupation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the
Six-Day War. Edited by
Michael Chabon and
Ayelet Waldman, the book was published as
Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation in June 2017. During the
Gaza War, she announced that she supports a
boycott of Israeli cultural institutions, including publishers and literary festivals. She was an original signatory of the manifesto "Refusing Complicity in Israel's Literary Institutions". ==Personal life==