After the Tall Timber

A visionary reporter, novelist, essayist and critic, Renata Adler is one of our most renowned and unmissable literary figures. But she is first and foremost a journalist. This collection of her her non-fiction showcases her rigorous journalistic voice in twenty-one pieces that are concerned with, in her words, misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process – and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.

With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analysing language: of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss.

In these essays, Adler draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), as well as uncollected work from the past two decades.

Author Biography

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 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).