Synopses & Reviews
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What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here."
Pitch Dark, Renata Adler's follow up to her prize winning book 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.
This new edition of Pitch Dark will include an interview between Renata Adler and Guy Trebay discussing the genesis and composition of the book.
“Renata Adler has succeeded with Kate in creating a character worth the trouble of writing and reading about, because of Kate's lively ideas, her intelligent opinions, her funny narrative style and her wonderful access to her own honesty. We feel for her plight, her broken heart, her love story.” —Muriel Spark, The New York Times
Synopsis
What s new. What else. What next. What s happened here.
Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland.
Composed in the style of Renata Adler s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art."
Synopsis
“What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.”
Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland.
Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.
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 1962 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).
Muriel Spark (1918–2006) was a Scottish novelist and poet. Among the best known of her twenty-two novels are The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, Memento Mori, and Loitering with Intent. In 1993 she was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.