Renata Adler

A visionary reporter, novelist, essayist and critic, Renata Adler is one of our most renowned and unmissable literary figures. But she is first and foremost a journalist. This collection of her her non-fiction showcases her rigorous journalistic voice in twenty-one pieces that are concerned with, in her words, misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process - and, to a degree, the journalist''s role in it.With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analysing language: of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss. In these essays, Adler draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), as well as uncollected work from the past two decades.

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

What''s new. What else. What next. What''s happened here. Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland.Composed in the style of Renata Adler''s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist''s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.A W&N Essential With an introduction by Muriel Spark