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).
Books
Pitch Dark
“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.” Pitch Dark, Renata Adler’s follow-up to her prize-winning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions, questions that bedevil Kate Ennis as she considers her relationship with her married lover. “A moving, infuriating, tantalizing book.”—The Boston Globe
Speedboat
Speedboat—a novel, a memoir, a lyric essay?—all questions of category fall away in its reading. What remains is Renata Adler’s voice, perceptive, wry, brilliant, making what sense she can of the late 20th-century condition. Speedboat was a revelation to writers as different as Elizabeth Hardwick and David Foster Wallace, and its true influence is only beginning to be felt.