An original collection of essays from a lauded journalist and the author of the novel Speedboat, this volume marks a thrilling reemergence of this writer's incomparable nonfiction and includes a new introduction by Adler.
After the Tall Timber: Collected Nonfiction
by Renata Adler
Contents (Not Final)
Preface by Michael Wolff vii
Author’s Introduction viii
Toward a Radical Middle, Introduction 3
The March for Non-Violence from Selma 15
Fly Trans-Love Airways 44
Letter from the Six-Day
War
66
The Black Power March in Mississippi 81
Radicalism in Debacle: The Palmer House 94
G. Gordon Liddy in America 116
But Ohio. Well, I Guess That’s One State Where They Elect to Lock
and Load: The National Guard 172
Letter from Biafra 205
A Year in the Dark, Introduction 246
On Violence: Film Always Argues Yes 260
House Critic 263
The Justices and the Journalists 289
The Extreme Nominee 301
Canaries in the Mineshaft, Introduction 313
Searching for the Real Nixon Scandal 350
Decoding the Starr Report 392
A Court of No Appeal 427
Irreparable Harm 465
The Porch Overlooks No Such Thing 484
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 1963 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 Canaries in the Mineshaft; Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker; Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and The Decision That Made George W. Bush President; and the novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark. Michael Wolff is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a columnist for the Guardian, USA Today, and British GQ, and is one of the most prominent journalists and pundits in the U.S. He has written numerous best-selling books, including The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch, Burn Rate, and Autumn of the Moguls. He appears often on the lecture circuit, and is a frequent guest on network and cable news shows.
"One of the most important postwar writers (and prose stylists),
Adler here covers everything from generational silliness to civil
rights in the South. It’s all the harder to put down because it
sometimes boils your blood." —Flavorwire
“Adler’s prose is exacting and full of surprises. As it turns out,
readers who started with Speedboat and Pitch
Dark came to know Adler backwards. They—we; I— hardly knew her
at all. As a journalist, Adler chronicled firsthand America’s odd
beauty. There are articles and essays covering the early Civil
Rights movement, Richard Nixon, soap operas, Biafra, the “hippie
riots” in Los Angeles, the Six-Day War, and Hollywood films. It’s
dark, but it’s also funny as hell. Renata Adler was a journalist at
the top of her game, working for the country’s most well-respected
publications. She was a woman working in a historically
male-dominated industry who played by her own rules. Rediscovering
Adler’s nonfiction feels right. After the Tall
Timber feels like an extension
of Speedboat and Pitch Dark, except here there’s the
added urgency and political resonance of narrative nonfiction. The
scale is greater, the stakes higher. Yet the method is the same.
Either way, her impact is felt.” —Anna Wiener, The New
Republic
“And yet, under that translucent superiority of style, there’s a
hum, a glimmer, a threat—most un–New Yorker–ish—to Adler’s New
Yorker pieces: the “scruffy, dazed, and twitching hen” in a
Biafran marketplace. She possessed a set of literary instincts not
quite as canine as, say, Hunter S. Thompson’s but no less acute or
telepathic, and in the end rather more dangerous. She goes off (in
her beautiful prose) like a barbarian blogger. Like, how come
nobody around here has any fucking manners?! But if not for
the out-of-scale ferocity of that, we wouldn’t have the
tremendous metaphysical sobriety of “Irreparable Harm,” her
2001 New Republic demolition of the Supreme Court’s
decision in Bush v. Gore. A rolling of tanks toward the
statehouse, a tripping girl on the Sunset Strip. It’s the signature
note of her work: that faint chime, like a wineglass flicked at the
rim, of apocalypse. Invisibly, even modestly, the world just ended.
Irremediable. Irreparable. But don’t you worry about it. Keep
reading The New York Times.” — James Parker, The
Atlantic
“Ladies and gentlemen, Renata Adler is back. It feels momentous and
just plain correct that we now have After the Tall
Timber, a new collection of Adler’s nonfiction.” — Abby
Aguirre, Vogue.com
“These analytical pieces address some of the major American events
of recent decades, such as Watergate, the Starr report on Bill
Clinton, the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v Gore, and the
decline of serious journalism, especially in the New York
Times. (“The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased
altogether to be a newspaper. It is still a habit.”). The return to
print of Adler’s work is great news.” —Molly McCloskey, The Irish
Times
“A boon to fans of Adler’s fiction and to anyone interested in the
state of contemporary journalism, particularly those who prefer a
brand of reporting that elevates facts, the story, above
the byline. Adler’s collection sets a rigorous standard for
reporting that, in light of recent failures at major American
magazines, is timely and refreshing. Adler can be just plain funny;
her ability to flow between gravity and jocularity is impressive.
She is present in all of these pieces, a low-level vibration of
critical genius.” —Lee Matalone, The Rumpus
“What’s happened to Renata Adler? Where has she gone, and why
hasn’t her return — to the extent that it is one — been trumpeted
from the hills? After the Tall Timber is, to put it mildly, an
irresistible corrective. In its way, the book is an equivalent (how
ideal is its title, in this respect) of the proverbial tree falling
in a forest. The sound it makes is both piercingly private and
roundly political, fully public in its implication. One ignores a
book like this not just at one’s own peril, but at the peril of the
Republic as well. One summation of her disdain for
the Times comes at the beginning of “The Porch Overlooks
No Such Thing” when she quotes its publisher Arthur Sulzberger,
Jr.: “There’s no complacency here. Never has been. Never will be.”
As Adler deliciously notes, such is “a perfect example of the
self-refuting sentence. In its underlying idiocy and limitless
self-regard it also manages to embody, and project through time, a
virtual definition of the word “complacency.” She was, and is after
all, a reporter. In any case, we’re more than lucky to have the
pieces in After the Tall Timber returned to us.” —
Matthew Spektor, LARB
“Adler has shown that bravery is one of the most important
qualities a writer can possess. That courage, that commitment to
telling the truth at all cost — and with language that is so
consistently dazzling — is one of the qualities I respect most
about her. It's what has kept me coming back to her work for so
many years.” — Juan Vidal, NPR.com
“These books are beautifully voice-driven in a way where a reader
might want to hear her take on just about anything. She is a very
precise writer, an exquisite crafter of sentences and paragraphs. I
want to know how someone who described their politics as moderate
in the late sixties and early seventies would define themselves
now. I want to hear what someone who covered the peace march in
Selma has to say about what happened in Ferguson following the
murder of Michael Brown. My own lack of real legal knowledge has me
reading all that's here and wishing to appoint her to the Supreme
Court.” — Brian Nicholson, Bookslut
“Last week I mentioned, that I was reading the new collection
of Renata Adler essays, and now I'm going to mention it again,
because the entire book is so fucking good. You have to
read it.” — Haley Mlotek, The Hairpin
“What needs to be said about NYRB’s important updating and
reissuing of Adler is that it is immensely valuable.” —Jeff Simon,
Buffalo News
“She is a pleasure, often a joy, to read...Adler's work is not a
reminder of how journalism used to be, but of how good, now and
then, it could be when acute minds paid attention to the words
published below their names...Adler writes very well indeed.” —Ian
Bell, The Herald Scotland
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