When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind.

Above all, there was its voice: ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthral a new generation of readers.

A W&N Essential with an introduction by Hilton Als.

Format: Paperback
Published: UK, 2026
Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
Pages: 164
Language: English
ISBN 10: 139962752X
ISBN 13: 9781399627528