Renata Adler Books

"What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here."   Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow up to her prize winning book Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, and moments (conversations, things unsaid, misunderstandings) of that fraught relationship reverberate throughout the novel, following Kate from her house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler’s celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of wisdom achievable only after a relentless quest.   “Renata Adler has succeeded with Kate in creating a character worth the trouble of writing and reading about, because of Kate's lively ideas, her intelligent opinions, her funny narrative style and her wonderful access to her own honesty. We feel for her plight, her broken heart, her love story.” —Muriel Spark, The New York Times

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. 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.

Delving into the complexities of American politics, this book offers a bold and revealing perspective from a renowned journalist. It uncovers the intricate dynamics and often unsettling truths behind political maneuvering, providing readers with an unfiltered look at the power struggles and ethical dilemmas faced by those in authority. With a commitment to fearless reporting, the author challenges conventional narratives and invites a deeper understanding of the political landscape.