NYRB Classics discussion

Speedboat



Publication Date: March 19, 2013
Pages: 200
Afterword by Guy Trebay.
Originally published in 1976.

Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Prize for Best First Novel in 1976

It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler’s Speedboat charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing to a newly liberated way of writing. This unclassifiable work is simultaneously novel, memoir, commonplace book, confession, and critique. It is the story of every man and woman cursed with too much consciousness and too little comprehension, and it is the story of Jen Fein, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Her voice is searching, cuttingly perceptive, and darkly funny as she breaks narrative convention to send dispatches back from the world as she finds it.