Description

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

Publisher 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