Speedboat
With an introduction by Hilton Als
Published on 22. July 2021
Book
Paperback/Softback
192 pages
978-1-4746-1586-0 (ISBN)
Description
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
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
Reviews / Votes
One of the more penetrating and oddly hypnotizing books I know; reading it is like being in a snowstorm. ...If all you get from SPEEDBOAT is a shudder of pleasure and self-recognition, you are probably not reading deeply enough. Welcome Back, Renata Adler -- Meghan O'Rourke, THE NEW YORKER I was in love and then I wasn't, and sometime during the drifting gray interim I was told by a bookseller friend to read SPEEDBOAT, a novel that had long been out of print but was absolutely, he insisted, worth the trouble of the search. ... My friend was correct, as booksellers usually are; it was as though the novel had outstretched arms and I fell in -- Anna Weiner, PARIS REVIEW Adler is page by page, line by line, and without interruption, brilliant -- Miranda Popkey, NEW YORK OBSERVER SPEEDBOAT is dazzling ...line for line and sentence for sentence, it seems to me thrilling. ... observant, funny, urban -- Matthew Spektor, THE BELIEVER The kind of book you buy multiple copies of to push on friends, the kind you dog-ear and mark up until it could line a hamster cage. It will literally knock your socks off. Read it -- CHICAGO TRIBUNE I can't think of a living stylist I admire more than Renata Adler -- Elif Batuman A brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life-abrupt, painful, and altogether splendid -- Donald BarthelmeMore details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Orion Publishing Co
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
165 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-4746-1586-0 (9781474615860)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
07/2021
1st Edition
Weidenfeld and Nicholson
€3.99
Available for download
Persons
RENATA ADLER was born in Milan and raised in Connecticut. She received a B.A. from Bryn Mawr, an M.A. from Harvard, a D.d E.S from the Sorbonne, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and an LL.D. (honorary) from Georgetown. Adler became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 1963 and, except for a year as the chief film critic of the New York Times, remained at the New Yorker for the next four decades. She has written six works of non-fiction, and the novels SPEEDBOAT (1976; winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and PITCH DARK (1983).