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 BookforumAdler's eye and ear for the peculiar are unmatched in American letters. Speedboat reveals at every turn bewildering forks in the route ahead, confusions between literal and figurative, a widespread misapprehension of scale and scope, a general loss of equilibrium; in the episodes of daily life, nothing presents itself in the form of a single entendre. —Gary Indiana ReviewRenata Adler's first novel, 'Speedboat" ... is that kind of book. The kind you buy multiple copies of to push on friends, the kind you dog-ear and mark up until it could line a hamster cage. A talisman, a weapon, a touchstone. ... I don't press "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" or "Beyond Good and Evil" on people anymore. But that's the kind of book that kind of book is, burning in your thoughts, a grass fire, consuming the air. ... Right down to its final, just-right sentence, it's -- well, it will literally knock your socks off. Read it. Michael Robbins, Chicago TribuneAftter years of being passed along to new readers like samizdat pamphlet. ... These are not works of realism--they have a dreamlike quality-- but they contain as much reality as a Balzac novel does. It's just that their reality is incantatory, sparse, periodically blazing. ... "Speedboat" is 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" and "Pitch Dark" is a shudder of pleasure and self-recognition, you are probably not reading deeply enough. Welcome Back, Renata Adler. MeghanO'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 Renata Adler's 1976 debut, 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. AnnaWeiner, Paris Review"She is one of the most brilliant—that is, vivid, intense, astute, and penetrating—essayists in contemporary letters, and most contrarian: much of what you think she will passionately undo. And she is a novelist whose voice, even decades after her books were written, seems new and original, and, if you are a writer, one you wish were your own." —Michael Wolff, The Guardian“I think Speedboat will find a new generation of dazzled readers.” —Katie Roiphe, Slate"Speedboat is as vital a document of the last half of the American century as Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Right down to its final, just-right sentence, it's—well, it will literally knock your socks off." —Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune“Speedboat captivates by its jagged and frenetic changes of pitch and tone and voice. Adler confides, reflects, tells a story, aphorizes, undercuts the aphorism, then undercuts that. Ideas, experiences, and emotions are inseparable. I don’t know what she’ll say next. She tantalizes by being simultaneously daring and elusive.” —David Shields, *Reality Hunger“Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.” —John Leonard, Vanity Fair*“A brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life—abrupt, painful, and altogether splendid.” —Donald Barthelme

For decades, Renata Adler's writing has upheld and defined the highest standards of investigative journalism. A staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Adler has reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress. She has also written about cultural matters, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, politics, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm's way in order to give us the news, not the "news" we have become accustomed to--celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas--but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. The peril that Adler places herself in comes specifically from speaking up (on the basis of careful research, common sense, original thought) when too many other writers have joined the pack. In this most basic and moral sense, Adler is one of the few independent...

“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.From BookforumPitch Dark is murky—not in a turgid sense, but clouded, rather, by troubled reflections, ambivalence, regrets. The weather of Pitch Dark is chilly. Secondary figures are fraught with shadowed histories. Incidents and asides illustrate a hapless, estranging condition of things. —Gary Indiana Review“Intense. . . brilliant. . . A mood, dark and sinister, grows steadily and a tight kind of suspense is created. . . For those who would like to know where fiction is headed, it’s somewhere in this aggressive, provocative direction.”—*People*“Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler’s gift for language and observation. . . and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions.”—Michiko Kakutani, *The New York Times*“Nobody in this country writes better prose than Renata Adler's.”—John Leonard, *Harper's*From the Trade Paperback edition.