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 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 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).