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Jen Fain is a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of 1970s
New York. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers,
professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these
dispatches from the world as she finds it. Simultaneously novel,
memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique - Speedboat is
funny, disturbing, cutting, brilliant unlike anything that had come
before. Since it burst onto the scene in the 1970s, it has
enthralled generations of readers and been a touchstone for writers
including David Foster Wallace, Claudia Rankine and Jenny Offill.
With an introduction by Hilton Als
When "Speedboat" burst on the scene in the late '70s it was like
nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the
rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease.
Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all,
there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen
Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of
contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone
dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill
these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it.
A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David
Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, "Speedboat "returns to
enthrall a new generation of readers.
From a legendary journalist and star writer at "The New Yorker" --
one of the most revered institutions in publishing -- an insider's
look at the magazine's tumultuous yet glorious years under the
direction of the enigmatic William Shawn.
Renata Adler went to work at "The New Yorker" in 1963 and
immediately became part of the circle close to editor William
Shawn, a man so mysterious that no two biographies of him seem to
be about the same person. Now Adler, herself an unrivaled literary
force, offers her brilliant take on the man -- and the myth that is
"The New Yorker" -- disputing recent memoirs by Lillian Ross and
Ved Mehta along the way.
With her lucid prose, meticulous eye for detail, and genuine love
of "The New Yorker, " Adler re-creates thirty years in its history
and depicts Shawn as a man of robust common sense, amazing
industry, and editorial genius, who nurtured innumerable major
talents (and egos) to produce a magazine that was -- and remains --
unique. Her ensemble cast -- all involved in legendary friendships,
feuds, and love affairs -- includes Edmund Wilson, S. N. Behrman,
Brendan Gill, Calvin Trillin, Dwight MacDonald, Donald Barthelme,
Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, S. I. Newhouse, Robert Gottlieb, Tina
Brown, and practically everyone of note in and around "The New
Yorker."
Above and beyond the fascinating literary anecdotes, however,
Adler's is a striking narrative that follows the weakening of
Shawn's hold over the magazine he loved, his reluctant attempts to
find a successor, and the coup by which he was ultimately
overthrown. It is a wonderful piece of reporting, full of real-life
drama of Shakespearean dimensions, which Shawn himself surely would
have loved.
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