The thing about Rachel Kushner is that she understands — with an intelligence that verges on sadistic — the knotty, contradictory dimensions of the self, and nowhere as cannily as in this story, ‘Fifty-Seven,’ which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Its interests as a story — namely, the effects of incarceration on one’s personhood — in the hands of a lesser writer would result in something tawdry and tasteless, patronizing, even. In Kushner’s hands, however, what we are presented instead is a tale both searing and stirring that manages to materialize her protagonist’s singularity against the backdrop of a system which seeks to annihilate it. (Bonus: Listening to Kushner read this story for The New Yorker‘s podcast is a serious lesson in how to read your own work!)
First published in The New Yorker, November 2015, and available to subscribers to read here; not currently collected in a volume of Kushner’s work
A Personal Anthology 