I never used to reread. Then I started teaching and had to think of books I cared about enough to want to discuss with students. Now I reread a lot. I’ve discovered that if I pick up more or less anything I read before I was 30, it’s as if I’m reading it for the first time. It’s odd – the more I read, the less I feel I’ve read. The last “classic” I reread was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which is one of those “over-familiar” books it has become fashionable to dismiss. I was, I think, just as enchanted by Gatsby’s forlorn love for Daisy as when I first read it as an A-level student.
― Hari Kunzru, Guardian
What booksellers are saying about Blue Ruin
- I love Hari Kunzru’s writing. His alchemical style produces novels that are both page-turners and deep ruminations on the political and philosophical mores of the contemporary world. In Blue Ruin, Kunzru takes on the art world of London in the 1990s and the bizarre, time-still days that were the summer of 2020. Confronted with their past selves, three art school friends must reckon with the meaning and purpose of making art; how it intersects with authenticity, success, vmoney, survival, and truth.
― Elese Stutts, Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina | BUY
- If art comes from the ineffable place where artist, intention and craft alchemize into something original, profound, provocative and memorable, then Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru is capital-A Art. I was spellbound.
― Matt Nixon, A Cappella Books in Atlanta, Georgia | BUY
- One of our sharpest observers of contemporary Euro-American culture takes readers on a journey through the Fine Art ecosystem from school, friendships and ambition to money, class and careers, weaving in plenty of complex relationships and subtle drama along the way.
― Jonathan Hawpe, Carmichael’s Bookstore in Louisville, Kentucky | BUY
About Hari Kunzru
Hari Kunzru is the author of six novels, Red Pill, White Tears, Gods Without Men, My Revolutions, Transmission, and The Impressionist. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
