Speedboat by Renata Adler - ISBN: 9781399627528
Paperback
A journalist’s wry, unconventional dispatches from urban America.
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Speedboat

With an introduction by Hilton Als

$18.39

  • Paperback

    192 pages

  • Release Date

    23 June 2026

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Summary

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, journa…

Book Details

ISBN-13:9781399627528
ISBN-10:139962752X
Author:Renata Adler, Hilton Als
Publisher:Orion Publishing Co
Imprint:Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Format:Paperback
Number of Pages:192
Release Date:23 June 2026
Weight:180g
Dimensions:196mm x 126mm x 18mm
Series:W&N Essentials
What They're Saying

Critics Review

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

About The Author

Renata Adler

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).

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