“I know the sensibility of what the final line is going to do – for me and for the reader.” Watch American novelist Rachel Kushner discuss the impact of the final line, and how she dislikes endings that “produce a sensation of an ellipsis.”
Kushner feels that the significance that a final sentence holds should be consistent through the entire book: “Every sentence should operate with a certain kind of responsibility to the reader.” The last sentence of her novels furthermore becomes apparent quite early in the writing process: “I have a feeling of great forward propulsion, because I know where I’m going, and the question is simply how it is that I’m going to get there.”
Rachel Kushner (b. 1968) is an American writer. Her debut novel ‘Telex from Cuba’ (2008) was a New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the winner of the California Book Award. Kushner’s 2013 novel ‘The Flamethrowers’ was also a finalist for the National Book Award that year. Among other places, her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and the Paris Review, and she is the recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles. For more about her see: http://rachelkushner.com/
Rachel Kushner was interviewed by Kasper Bech Dyg in connection to the Louisiana Literature festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark in August 2015.
Camera: Jakob Solbakken
Edited by: Klaus Elmer
Produced by: Marc-Christoph Wagner
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2016
source
