After being out of print for decades, Renata Adler’s critically acclaimed cult novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark are going to be re-released as New York Review Books classics. Of Adler’s fiction, John Leonard wrote: “Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.”
The New York Review’s Sara Kramer writes:
“We don’t have the books scheduled yet, but they’ll most likely be published at the start of 2013 (it sounds far away but it’s our next available season). We usually talk about the classics series as publishing books that had been forgotten, but the Adler books are a little different. Far from being forgotten, it seems that if anything their reputation and influence have grown over the years.”
In 2010, a National Book Critics Circle poll identified Speedboat, winner of the 1976 Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, as the book most members wanted to see back in print. The acquisitions are also are a significant get for New York Review Books: Melville House was so certain that they were going to win the rights to the novels that they included them in their 2012 catalogue.
Adler’s fiction “picks up on a certain New York-intellectual-bohemian strand in the series, but their narrative mode is something of a departure from what we’ve published in the past,” Kramer told Bookforum. “Add that to the fact that Adler wrote for the Review back in the day and that Elizabeth Hardwick was an early champion of [Speedboat] it all seemed pre-ordained.” (One of Adler’s contributions to the NYRB was her notorious scathing essay about Pauline Kael.)
After publishing her two novels, Adler went on to release four books of nonfiction, including Gone, a controversial book about working at The New Yorker.
And now the big question about the reissues: who will write the introductions?