Pioneer Works presents the official paperback launch of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, one of the most talked-about books of the year and a finalist for the Booker Prize.

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils. But Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Rachel Kushner has become one of our most iconic and influential contemporary writers: her cherished novels on art and motorcycles, politics and prisons, have traveled from Cuba to California to Red Guards-era Italy to the ancient caves and anarchist collectives of Creation Lake—a noir fiction that’s taut, dazzling, and replete with high comedy and high art alike.

For this special Author Talk during Second Sundays, Kushner will be in conversation with PW’s Director of Publishing, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. Books will be available for sale, and a signing with the writer will follow her talk.

Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro is Director of Publishing at Pioneer Works and the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Pioneer Works Broadcast. A geographer and writer, he teaches at NYU and writes for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, among many other publications. His books include Island People, Names of New York, and, with Rebecca Solnit, Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.

This program is part of Pioneer Works Broadcast's Author Talks, a series highlighting authors and thinkers across disciplines.

Pioneer Works Broadcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, bridging the two cultures of science and the arts.