Ben Lerner

A NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ALSO NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Esquire, NPR, Vogue, Amazon, Kirkus, The Times (UK), Buzzfeed, Vanity Fair, The Telegraph (UK), Financial Times (UK), Lit Hub, The Times Literary Supplement (UK), The New York Post, Daily Mail (UK), The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian (UK), Electric Literature, SPY.com, and the New York Public Library From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

A Novel

The Topeka School

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam's 'research' soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossable distance between himself and the world around him. It's not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, and his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station

Having passed a year marked by unlikely literary success, a potentially fatal medical diagnosis and a friend's request to help her conceive a child, a man explores his prospects in a New York that is overwhelmed by frequent superstorms and social unrest. By the award-winning author of Leaving the Atocha Station.

10:04: A Novel

"The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

The Hatred of Poetry

a novel

In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called 'hilarious... cracklingly intelligent... and original in every sentence', Lerner's new novel charts an exhilarating course through the contemporary landscape of sex, friendship, memory, art and politics, and captures what it is like to be alive right now.

10:04

Library Journal honored Lerner's debut volume as a "Book of the Year."

Angle of Yaw

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School. Ben Lerner's The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to “the real forces at work in the popular” and “the wind in the poplars,” “the blue glow of the screen” and “the snow blue in the light.” Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, the poems ultimately communicate—in their unpredictability, in their intensities—the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

Poems

The Lights

Atocha'dan Ayrılış

Composed of two alternating sequences, a collection of poems explores how mass culture influences language.

Mean Free Path

Topeka Okulu

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for Emerging Poets, is a sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationships between language and memory, violence and form. The book takes its title from the fernlike patterns that sometimes appear (and quickly fade) in the aftermath of a lightning strike. Lerner's poems mimic and explore the complex juxtapositions of contemporary culture through permutation, repetition, and collage. The vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang, the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet, and cliches are cracked open and made new and strange. Throughout this debut, flashes of autobiography, comedy, fury, and critique illuminate an eclectic sensibility that is sometimes in command of, and sometimes commanded by, the power of speech.

The Lichtenberg Figures

Alexander Kluge

American author Ben Lerner and German filmmaker and writer Alexander Kluge come from two different generations but share a single passion: an interest in the long-term effects of things. A line from Lerner's poem "The Sky Stops Painting and Turns to Criticism," which Kluge was struck by some years ago, became the starting point for their first joint book project. Kluge responded to this celestial critique with a story about the technically controlled power of a squadron of bombers in the skies over Aleppo, which Lerner answered with a sonnet. Step by step this dialogue gave rise to poems, stories and conversations in which the heavens reveal their bewitching and threatening qualities. A series of 21 photographs that Gerhard Richter took in Venice in the 1970s augments the interplay of texts and the principle of interconnecting poetic horizons, as well as images by Rebecca H. Quaytman and Thomas Demand. Ben Lerner (born 1979) is the author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station as well as three books of poetry. He is based in Brooklyn and is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. Alexander Kluge (born 1932) is the author and director of numerous novels and films. A student of Theodor Adorno and assistant to Fritz Lang, Kluge has won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival four times and nearly every major German-language literature award.

The Snows of Venice

«Chiunque si interessi alla migliore letteratura contemporanea dovrebbe leggere Ben Lerner, e questo romanzo è il modo migliore per iniziare» (Jeffrey Eugenides, autore di Le vergini suicide). Un uomo di poco più di trent’anni scopre di avere una malattia cardiaca potenzialmente fatale. Allo stesso tempo la sua migliore amica gli chiede di fare da donatore e di aiutarla a concepire un figlio, mentre la carriera di scrittore che persegue da tempo incontra finalmente un singolare e inaspettato successo ...

Nel mondo a venire

The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice memos and vignettes, songs and silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to the forces that shape human society and to the rhythms of the natural world, to the power of new technologies and the wonder of our timeless planet. Sometimes the scale is intimate and quiet and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the "collectivization of feeling": "I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones." Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights records the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises. And, even while alert to the darkness, it is the light in the book that remains, in dusk, in images from space, in old poems, in power cuts, in the flickering connections between people. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, illuminating new possibilities of thought and feeling.

Following the international buzz for his debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, comes 10:04, Ben Lerner's electric second novel that blends artistry and wit, intelligence and tenderness. A unique collision between art and life by an extraordinary young writer. For readers of Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti. Leaving the Atocha Station was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels...of his generation" (Lorin Stein, New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now Lerner's second novel departs from Atocha's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious...cracklingly intelligent...and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to both our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.

Ben Lerner

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