num_pages: 178
description: 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,
language: English
title: Speedboat
titlecomplete: Speedboat
genres: 20th Century, Literature, American, Classics, Literary Fiction, Womens, Novels, New York, Short Stories, Fiction
ratings_count: 6203
awards: awardedAt: 189331200000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 220953600000
name: PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
publisher: Random House