Speed Boat Kings

Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. 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 enthrall a new generation of readers.

Miss England II is the legendary record-breaking speedboat of the 1930s and is the first speedboat to cross the 100mph barrier. This book covers the story of this speedboat and includes facts and photographs of record-breaking history, motor-sport history, and British patriotic history.

Readers can relive the true golden age of high-performance classic speedboats in this book that covers these mighty wooden-hulled craft from around World War I until just before the second World War. This was an era when speed was still a new plaything, and speedboats and aircraft were raced as passionately as were automobiles; when massive mahogany speedboats powered by engines from suppliers such as Rolls-Royce competed fiercely against rivals from around the world. Classic speedboat enthusiasts will relish the cutaway drawings of these craft, as well as the choice archival photography and the modern color photography of these now-impeccably restored beauties.