mcnallyjackson:

slaughterhouse90210:

“Whatever. Being neurotic seemed to be a kind of wild card, an all-purpose explanation.”
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

1. lol

2. Renata Adler will be speaking at your friendly (Park Slope) neighborhood bookshop, Community, tonight at 7pm. I’ll see you there, k?

3. Do you subscribe to our newsletter? Yes? You’re awesome. No? You should! Because if you did, you would have received, in your inbox this morning, “Our Choral Ode to Renata Adler”: 

That bemused countenance, that horsewhip braid, that penchant for looking awry. Yep, we’re aswoon for Renata. Re-na-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Re. Na. Ta. We sketch her likeness in our spiral notebooks, adopt her patterns of speech, attempt her confident stance, wear belt-less jeans. We’d launch a 1,000 speedboats in her honor, if we had them. We don’t. 

How good would that have made your morning? Sign up for our mailing list here here here here.

Renata Adler/Issue Project Room/Greenpoint/tomorrow

This gentleman was reading Renata Adler’s Speedboat on the Q train to work this morning. You can hear Renata live in the flesh tomorrow at 155 Freeman St., between Manhattan & Franklin Aves in Greenpoint, as part of the Issue Project Room “Littoral” event series, tomorrow at 8 p.m. She’ll be reading from her novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark, and talking with our editor Edwin Frank. If you’ve already read Renata’s books, you’ll know the talk could go something like this:

    ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ the Englishman said, waving his drink and breathing so heavily at me that I could feel my bangs shift. ‘I have a terrible cold.’
    ‘He would probably have married her,’ a voice across the room said, ‘with the exception that he died.’
    ‘Well, I am a personality that prefers not to be annoyed.’
    ‘We should all prepare ourselves for this eventuality.’
    A six-year-old was passing the hors d’oeuvres. The baby, not quite steady on his feet, was hurtling about the room.
    ‘He’s following me,’ the six-year-old said, in despair.
    ‘Then lock yourself in the bathroom, dear,’ Inez replied.
    ‘He always waits outside the door.’
    ‘He loves you, dear.’
    ‘Well, I don’t like it.’
    ‘How I envy you,’ the minister’s wife was saying to a courteous, bearded boy, ‘reading Magic Mountain for the first time.’

Renata Adler at the Center for Fiction

“Well, you know. His wife was chased by an elephant.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Yes. it was too awful. They were watching the elephants, when she simply fell down. The elephant ran over and knelt on her. she was in the hospital for months.”
“No.”
“How extraordinary.”
“Quite different from anything she ever got from Roger, I expect.”

Renata Adler reading last night, perhaps from this, one of her favorite passages from Speedboat, at the Center for Fiction. Photograph via the twitter feed of the N+1 film supplement.

In this interview with K. Jones, Wallace Shawn talks about his own fear in creating work, and Speedboat author Renata Adler’s influence on him during his early years as a playwright and creating My Dinner with André. 

(Thanks to The Improvised LIfe for linking to this interview!).

Renata Adler & David Shields talk tonight at The Strand.  →

To get in you either have to buy a copy of Speedboat or Pitch Dark or a $15 Strand gift certificate. We think this is pretty fair.

Did you read Renata Adler's interview in The Believer? →

Our favorite part? “I’ve always been somewhat leery of editing and publication. But the editors at New York Review Classics have been great.” A very, very rare compliment from Ms. Adler.

slaughterhouse90210:

“That ‘writers write’ is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.”
—Renata Adler, Speedboat

“Difficulty, irony, coolness”

Speedboat is structured like a clothesline, stringing together a series of anecdotes and musings, each quite unrelated to the last, complete with gaps in between. But somehow, and this is a curious achievement, the epigrams and parables have a common thread beyond the book’s own binding. The consciousness that narrates them somehow manages to seem a complete person hovering above, if not represented formally in the jagged edges of the book.

—From a review of Renata Adler’s Speedboat by Michelle Dean at B&N Review. She also writes, “It’s a strange thing that people don’t know the name Renata Adler anymore.”

But we are starting to suspect that people will.

millionsmillions:

“Scrolling through news bits and status updates between passages of Speedboat, I’m floored by how the novel reads as a somewhat verbose Twitter feed. That is, verbose for Twitter. Succinct for anything else.”

In the Wake of Speedboat: On Renata Adler’s 1976 Novel by Eric Dean Wilson

elanormcinerney:

Renata Adler | Speedboat

You could buy an ebook of Renata Adler’s Speedboat just about anywhere, but wouldn’t you like to buy it from Emily Books?

Renata Adler, back in print

I was lying on a Mediterranean boat deck, on a windless day. It was odd that I should be there, but no more odd than my work, or the slums, or the places where people do find themselves as their luck shifts. A girl of eighteen was taking the sun with great seriousness. The rest of our party were swimming, or playing cards below, or drinking hard. The girl was blond, shy, and laconic. After two hours of silence, in that sun, she spoke. ‘When you have a tan,’ she said, ‘what have you got?’

Today Renata Adler’s much-talked-about novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, are back in print. The above quotation is from Speedboat, and we think gives a good sense of the episodic style and brutal perception that has made Adler and her novels so influential, and much in discussion recently at places like The New York Times Book Review, New York magazine, 3:AM magazine, The Guardian, Off on a Tangent blog, Chicago Tribune (behind a paywall), Slate, Quarterly Conversation, and The New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog.

I drink some milk, feel rather sick from the thickness and richness of it; make some coffee, drink that with warm milk, feel marginally better

—Renata Adler, Pitch Dark

Submit pictures of your copies of NYRB Classics (or books from our Children’s Collction) with coffee, tea, cocoa or any warm drink and we will post them here. This photo is courtesy of Jessica Ferri

janehu:

As per the NYRB’s “Coffee and Classics Club.” (The Adler edition.)

And a process shot to boot—nice touch!

theparisreview:

“These are fundamentally probing, even discomfiting, books.” Meghan O’Rourke pays tribute to Renata Adler. 

For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.

emilygould:

You might have already guessed that this is Emily Books’s March pick!  We’ll send it to our subscribers on its NYRB release date in late March, later than we usually send out our picks, but worth the wait.

I got the print edition in the mail yesterday and last night cracked its spine waiting for my subway home from work. Within ten seconds a man approached me. He had something to say!  “That’s my favorite book,” he said. “I’m so glad more people are reading it now.”

I stuttered something about how it is a new edition and he just gave me a look like obviously he knows that, everyone knows that. After a week on the West Coast an interaction like this was just what I needed to feel back at home.  Now you’re in New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of slightly pompous dudes who know when to anticipate the release of new NYRB Classics.