Leaving the Atocha Station

Gales of laughter howl through [this] remarkable first novel. It's packed full of gags and page-long one-liners... intensely and unusually brilliant -- Geoff Dyer * Observer * [This book] stood out from everything else I read this year -- Catherine O'Flynn, Books of the Year * Observer * The best new novel I've read for a long time -- James Meek Seductively intelligent and stylish writing, mercilessly comic in the ways it strips the creative ego bare -- Peter Carty * Independent * Funny, uplifting and moving... Lerner's genius is to put into words that universal, often-lost period when most young people are commitment-free but weighed down with a sense of the nascent self... We finish this book feeling a little cleverer, and a little happier -- Isabel Berwick * Financial Times * Wonderful precision and comic timing... Superb -- Anthony Cummins * Metro * An anatomy of a generation's uncertainty and self-involvement, the novel offers a carefully constructed snapshot of a nation in doubt... Beautifully written -- Stephen J. Burns * Times Literary Supplement * The overall narrative is structured around subtle, delicate moments... They're comic but they're also beautiful and touching and precise -- Jenny Turner * Guardian * Hilarious and cracklingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence, and abuzz with the feel of our late-late-modern moment -- Jonathan Franzen * Guardian, Books of the Year 2011 * [A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel. . . . [with] a beguiling mixture of lightness and weight. There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page -- James Wood * New Yorker * One of the most talked-about fiction debuts this year, it's a book for anyone who's ever been young and self-conscious in a foreign city. The Spanish travails (or lack of them) of Lerner's preening poet narrator are painful, well-observed and often very funny -- Hari Kunzru One of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation. . . . [A] dazzlingly good novel -- Lorin Stein * New York Review of Books * A dazzling first novel that does not flinch from difficulty but asks questions of language and art and what we can do with them -- Amy Sackville, Books of the Year * Big Issue * 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 I love to death Ben Lerner's novel . . . [A] significant book -- David Shields * Los Angeles Review of Books * A marvellous novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully dimensional and compelling character * Wall Street Journal * A slightly deranged, philosophically inclined monologue in the Continental tradition running from Buchner's Lenz to Thomas Bernhard and Javier Marias. The adoption of this mode by a young American narrator-solipsistic, overmedicated, feckless yet ambitious-ends up feeling like the most natural thing in the world -- Benjamin Kunkel * New Statesman, Best Books of 2011 * Lerner's remarkable first novel is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it's like to be a young American abroad... for America, the path from The Sun Also Rises to Leaving the Atocha Station seems frighteningly downward -- Gary Sernovitz * New York Times Book Review * This debut has already created quite a stir in the US. Jonathan Franzen is a fan ("hilarious and crackingly intelligent") as is Paul Auster -- Alice O'Keeffe * Bookseller * Billy Liar as written by Proust -- Tom Sutcliffe * BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review * Hugely entertaining -- Liz Jensen The author's poetic skills and sandpaper-dry humour mounted a charm offensive * Skinny * An extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life -- John Ashbery [In th

Born in 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, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Munster State Prize for International Poetry. In 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College. This is his first novel.