Fiction. 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 is it merely a projection of our desired interpretations? 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.
"Utterly charming. Lerner's self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly and hilariously all his own."—Paul Auster
"An extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life."—John Ashbery
Author City: BROOKLYN, NY USA
Ben Lerner is the author of the novel LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION (Coffee House Press, 2011) and three books of poetry: MEAN FREE PATH (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); ANGLE OF YAW (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book; and THE LICHTENBERG FIGURES (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, he holds a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University and teaches at Brooklyn College. In 2011 Lerner became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie.
Reviews and Other Links
Publishers Weekly
Joshua Corey @ Jacket2
interview by Tao Lin @ The Believer
interview by Teddy Wayne @ The Huffington Post
David Shields @ Los Angeles Review of Books
Christopher Griffith @ The Outlet
Yelena Akhtiorskaya @ The Jewish Daily Forward
Amanda Calderon @ Explosion-Proof
J. A. Tyler @ The Rumpus
Nina MacLaughlin @ Time Out New York
interview by Adam Fitzgerald @ BOMB
Joshua Cohen @ The Faster Times
Laura Kolbe @ Open Letters Monthly
Meagan Day @ Full Stop
James Wood @ The New Yorker
Jonathan Franzen's Book of the Year @ The Guardian
Benjamin Kunkel's Book of the Year @ New Statesman
Josh Dzieza @ The Daily Beast
James Wood @ The New Yorker
2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist
audio: Lerner in conversation with Gary Sernovitz and host Tom Ashbrook @ WBUR's On Point