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

Autorentext
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. Her books include **A YEAR IN THE DARK (1969); TOWARD A RADICAL MIDDLE (1970); RECKLESS DISREGARD: WESTMORELAND V. CBS ET AL., SHARON V. TIME (1986); CANARIES IN THE MINESHAFT (2001); GONE: THE LAST DAYS OF THE NEW YORKER (1999); IRREPARABLE HARM: THE U.S. SUPREME COURT AND THE DECISION THAT MADE GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDENT **(2004); and the novels SPEEDBOAT **(1976; winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel) and PITCH DARK (1983).

Klappentext

'I can't think of a living stylist I admire more than Renata Adler' ELIF BATUMAN
'Luminously exact' NEW YORK TIMES
'It was as though the novel had outstretched arms and I fell in' PARIS REVIEW

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 enthral a new generation of readers.

A W&N Essential with an introduction by Hilton Als

Zusammenfassung
A novel unlike anything that came before it that changed all that came after it - a cult classic for readers of Maggie Nelson, Jenny Offill, Ben Lerner and Anne Carson