Pitch Dark (Nyrb Classics) - Softcover

Adler, Renata

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1590176146 ISBN 13: 9781590176146

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 2013

Synopsis

What s new. What else. What next. What s happened here."

Pitch Dark, Renata Adler s follow-up to her prizewinning novel Speedboat, is a book of questions. It is also a book of false starts, red herrings, misunderstandings, and all-too-fleeting revelations. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in her affair with a married lover, and moments (conversations, things unsaid, misunderstandings) of that fraught relationship reverberate throughout the novel, following Kate from her house in rural Connecticut and her New York City brownstone apartment, to a small island off the coast of Washington, and to an utterly dark road in a remote corner of Ireland. Told in Adler s celebrated fragmented style, and constructed from the bare-bones language of everyday life, Pitch Dark transcends its parts to come to the kind of wisdom achievable only after a relentless quest.

About this title

Review:

"She is one of the most brilliant that is, vivid, intense, astute, and penetrating essayists in contemporary letters, and most contrarian: much of what you think she will passionately undo. And she is a novelist whose voice, even decades after her books were written, seems new and original, and, if you are a writer, one you wish were your own." Michael Wolff, The Guardian Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler s gift for language and observation . . . and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions. Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times These novels are records of a penetrating intelligence, a skeptical intelligence (but, thank God, not a reflexively skeptical intelligence). They are novels that persuade you of their claims to truth, and ones in which any literate young person in publishing in New York can see a bit of her or himself [...] It s great to have these novels back in print, at long last. Meghan O Rourke, The New Yorker "Adler's novels concede the necessity of making fiction quicker, more terse, descriptively less elaborate than the traditional thing called a novel, not so much in deference to shrunken attention spans, but as the most plausible way of rendering the distracted, fragmentary quality of contemporary consciousness [...] They describe what it's like to be living now, during this span of time, in our particular country and our particular world. This is what the best novels have always done, and with any luck will continue to do." Gary Indiana, Bookforum "Pitch Dark, like Speedboat, exudes a certain openness, a vulnerability, even. Adler dispenses with the defined paths of traditional narrative, along with expectations of order and sequence, and instead pieces together a collage of consciousness." Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review If you simply allow [Adler s fragments] to settle in their own patterns, flashing light where they will, you ll find Pitch Dark a bright kaleidoscope of a book. Anne Tyler --Michael Wolff, The Guardian, Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times,Meghan O Rourke, The New Yorker, Gary Indiana, Bookforum,Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times Book Review, Anne Tyler

About the Author:

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).

 

About this edition

• Publisher: NYRB Classics
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1590176146
• ISBN 13: 9781590176146
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 168