Renata Adler

"It has been more than thirty-five years since Renata Adler's Speedboat, Winner of the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel, charged through the literary establishment, blasting genre walls and pointing the way for 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"--

When someone you love vanishes without a trace. . .ex-FBI profiler Pierce Quincy, it's the beginning of his worst nightmare. A car found abandoned, enging running, a woman's purse on the driver's seat: And the driver of that car, Pierce's estranged wife, Rainier has vanished.

"In the winter of 1984, an extraordinary series of events brought two remarkable libel suits to trial in neighboring courtrooms in Manhattan, and in doing so brought into almost astrological configuration three of America's most powerful establishments; military, legal and journalistic. In both courtrooms, a renowned general was suing a media giant for libel: William Westmoreland contended that he had been libeled in a CBS documentary that claimed he had led a "conspiracy at the highest levels" to conceal crucial estimates about enemy troop strength in Vietnam; and Israel's Ariel Sharon was suing Time for having published a story claiming that Sharon had discussed the need to take "revenge" with Lebanese Christian leaders just before a Phalangist massacre of Palestinians during the Lebanese War. To complete the paralleled, both CBS and Time were defended by the same aggressive New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. With an unmatched eye for the telling or damning detail, and with an unprecedented understanding of the way in which important trials are shaped not simply by what goes on in the courtroom but by the long and opaque process of deposition and discovery before the trial, Adler draws a portrait of lawyers, generals and journalists worthy of Daumier or Dickens."--Jacket.

"In this new collection of essays, spanning three decades, Adler's wide-ranging reflections remain centered on two increasingly fused areas of interest: the politics by which we organize our common and public world, and the media, which now actually distort our information about that world."--BOOK JACKET.