Books by Ben Lerner

The Topeka School: A Novel

by Ben Lerner

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award

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, Ben Lerner's 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.

The Topeka School: A Novel

by Ben Lerner

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award

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.

The Lights: Poems

by Ben Lerner

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The Lights: Poems

by Ben Lerner

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and Electric Literature

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.

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. 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, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

The Hatred of Poetry

by Ben Lerner

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore."

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

10:04: A Novel

by Ben Lerner

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.
A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

10:04: A Novel

by Ben Lerner

A stunning, urgent, and original novel from Ben Lerner (The Topeka School and Leaving the Atocha Station) about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire.

Winner of The Paris Review's 2012 Terry Southern Prize

A Finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work 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 is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year By:
The New Yorker The New York Times Book Review The Wall Street Journal The Village Voice The Boston Globe NPR Vanity Fair The Guardian (London) The L Magazine The Times Literary Supplement (London) The Globe and Mail (Toronto) The Huffington Post Gawker Flavorwire San Francisco Chronicle The Kansas City Star The Jewish Daily Forward Tin House

Mean Free Path

by Ben Lerner

“Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.”—Publishers Weekly
“Sharp, ambitious, and impressive.” —Boston Review
National Book Award finalist Ben Lerner turns to science once again for his guiding metaphor. “Mean free path” is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection are full of layered collisions—repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations—that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there’s the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.
You startled me. I thought you were sleeping
In the traditional sense. I like looking
At anything under glass, especially
Glass. You called me. Like overheard
Dreams. I’m writing this one as a woman
Comfortable with failure. I promise I will never
But the predicate withered. If you are
Uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture
Close your eyes. No, you startled
Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Angle of Yaw

by Ben Lerner

In his bold second book, Ben Lerner molds philosophical insight, political outrage, and personal experience into a devastating critique of mass society. Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view.

The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him.

Haunted by our current “war on terror,” much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.

Leaving the Atocha Station

by Ben Lerner

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 relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s “research” becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?

In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.
Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

The Snows of Venice The Lerner-Kluge-container

by Ben Lerner, 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 Lichtenberg Figures (Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets)

by Ben Lerner

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.
Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.
Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

Transcription A Novel

by Ben Lerner

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend, Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink. He arrives at Thomas’s house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.