Overview

From a legendary journalist and star writer at The New Yorker -- one of the most revered institutions in publishing -- an insider's look at the magazine's tumultuous yet glorious years under the direction of the enigmatic William Shawn. Renata Adler went to work at The New Yorker in 1963 and immediately became part of the circle close to editor William Shawn, a man so mysterious that no two biographies of him seem to be about the same person. Now Adler, herself an unrivaled literary force, offers her brilliant take on the man -- and the myth that is The New Yorker -- disputing recent memoirs by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta along the way. With her lucid prose, meticulous eye for detail, and genuine love of The New Yorker, Adler re-creates thirty years in its history and depicts Shawn as a man of robust common sense, amazing industry, and editorial genius, who nurtured innumerable major talents (and egos) to produce a magazine that was -- and remains -- unique. Her ensemble cast -- all involved in legendary friendships, feuds, and love affairs -- includes Edmund Wilson, S. N. Behrman, Brendan Gill, Calvin Trillin, Dwight MacDonald, Donald Barthelme, Hannah Arendt, Pauline Kael, S. I. Newhouse, Robert Gottlieb, Tina Brown, and practically everyone of note in and around The New Yorker. Above and beyond the fascinating literary anecdotes, however, Adler's is a striking narrative that follows the weakening of Shawn's hold over the magazine he loved, his reluctant attempts to find a successor, and the coup by which he was ultimately overthrown. It is a wonderful piece of reporting, full of real-life drama of Shakespearean dimensions, which Shawn himself surely would have loved.

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9781451667226

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Reviews

Newsweek Fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism which vibrate with control, confidence, and zest. Michiko Kakutani The New York Times Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler's gift for language and observation. She seems capable of writing about anything from tent caterpillars to metaphysics with intelligence and wit; and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions....She can delineate the hurt of being the lover, not the loved, in a line; convey the paranoia of traveling in a strange country with an image; and read the end of a romance in gesture. William Shannon The Washington Post Renata Adler...has written a bombshell. It is brilliant in its analysis, relentlessly argued, and unsparing in its moral and professional journalistic judgments....Only a mind with her elegance and sensitivity to nuance could have produced this remarkable book, and a mind of this quality is rarely caged by an ideology. Donald Barthelme Renata Adler's new book is a brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life -- abrupt, direct, painful, and altogether splendid. John Leonard Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.

Michiko Kakutani The New York Times Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler's gift for language and observation. She seems capable of writing about anything from tent caterpillars to metaphysics with intelligence and wit; and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions....She can delineate the hurt of being the lover, not the loved, in a line; convey the paranoia of traveling in a strange country with an image; and read the end of a romance in gesture. William Shannon The Washington Post Renata Adler...has written a bombshell. It is brilliant in its analysis, relentlessly argued, and unsparing in its moral and professional journalistic judgments....Only a mind with her elegance and sensitivity to nuance could have produced this remarkable book, and a mind of this quality is rarely caged by an ideology. Newsweek Fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism which vibrate with control, confidence, and zest. Donald Barthelme Renata Adler's new book is a brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life -- abrupt, direct, painful, and altogether splendid. John Leonard Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.

John Leonard Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler.

Newsweek Fourteen pieces of reporting and criticism which vibrate with control, confidence, and zest. Donald Barthelme Renata Adler's new book is a brilliant series of glimpses into the special oddities and new terrors of contemporary life -- abrupt, direct, painful, and altogether splendid. John Leonard Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler. Michiko Kakutani The New York Times Two things hold Pitch Dark together and give it speed and magic. The first is Miss Adler's gift for language and observation. She seems capable of writing about anything from tent caterpillars to metaphysics with intelligence and wit; and the second is her willingness to write candidly, even rawly, about emotions....She can delineate the hurt of being the lover, not the loved, in a line; convey the paranoia of traveling in a strange country with an image; and read the end of a romance in gesture. William Shannon The Washington Post Renata Adler...has written a bombshell. It is brilliant in its analysis, relentlessly argued, and unsparing in its moral and professional journalistic judgments....Only a mind with her elegance and sensitivity to nuance could have produced this remarkable book, and a mind of this quality is rarely caged by an ideology.

Author Information

Renata Adler has had an unrivaled career as a reporter, novelist, and short story writer; intellectual gadfly; and New Yorker staffer. Educated at Bryn Mawr, Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Yale Law School, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, and the film critic of The New York Times. The author of prize-winning short stories, a prize-winning novel (Speedboat), a number of other highly praised books, and countless admired and controversial articles for The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, National Review, New Republic, and other publications, she lives in New York.

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