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.

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

"What's new. What else. What next. What's happened here." Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, and moments (conversations, things unsaid, misunderstandings) of that fraught relationship reverberate throughout the novel, following Kate from her house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler's celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare-bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of wisdom achievable only after a relentless quest.

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.