Renata Adler achieved a controversial success and notoriety in the New York literary scene. Her film reviews for the New York Times (collected in A Year in the Dark, 1969) appeared refreshingly honest, insightful, and iconoclastic to some, opinionated...

Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an American journalist and writer. After attending Bryn Mawr, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later enrolled in Yale Law School. In 1968-69, she was chief...

Battle of the BM's One of the more comical spectacles now on offer is that of Renata Adler claiming harassment by Big Media, in the form of CBS and Time Inc. You'll recall that last June, Adler published two articles in The...

Reckless Disregard: CBS vs. "The New Yorker' Among the materials burdening the desk of William Shawn, venerable editor of The New Yorker, is an immense communication from CBS, signed by Van Gordon Sauter, president of CBS News. It concerns Renata Adler's two...

When I met him at the Times Square offices of The New Yorker, Roger Angell—who’s just published a new book of autobiographical essays, Let Me Finish—seemed slightly out of place, though he’s been showing up for work at the magazine for 50 years. A spry...

When I met him at the Times Square offices of The New Yorker, Roger Angell—who’s just published a new book of autobiographical essays, Let Me Finish—seemed slightly out of place, though he’s been showing up for work at the magazine for 50 years. A spry...

I do not have the attention span to sustain a lengthy depression, but I have of late been reading two novelists who do: Renata Adler and Joan Didion. I think of them as the Sunshine Girls, largely because in their work the sun is never shining…. They seem, these two writers, not really happy unless they are sad. They keep, to alter the line from an old song, a frown on their page for the whole modern age. (p. 62) Of the two, Renata Adler is the less practiced novelist. She has written, in fact, two n...

In excruciating conversations over drinks around the city, during the fourteen months that Renata Adler served as film critic for The New York Times, I often found myself serving, by a whoosh of role suction, as her apologist. When anyone else present seemed prepared to champion her critical honor, I'd find myself laying back. Even after a heavy artillery barrage, my reinforcements were timid and lackluster…. Now Random House has published all her Times stuff (January, 1968–February, 19...

Nature abhors a vacuum—at least in the little nook of the universe we inhabit. According to continuities and correspondences we cannot easily explain, the descriptive power of that statement appears to extend to some areas of art…. [This is true of] some advanced areas of literature. For a number of years I have kept a list of devices and terms proposed from many sides to replace unity as the central organizing principle, particularly in the novel: digression, parody, marginal discourse, refle...