"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"--

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.