Speedboat

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 YORKERI 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 REVIEWAdler is page by page, line by line, and without interruption, brilliant – Miranda Popkey, NEW YORK OBSERVERSPEEDBOAT is dazzling …line for line and sentence for sentence, it seems to me thrilling. … observant, funny, urban – Matthew Spektor, THE BELIEVERThe 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 TRIBUNEI can’t think of a living stylist I admire more than Renata Adler – Elif BatumanA brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life-abrupt, painful, and altogether splendid – Donald Barthelme

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).