Ben Lerner – författare

Ett verk så självlysande originellt till stil och form att det framstår som ett förebud, en komet från framtiden.

Geoff Dyer i The Guardian

Adam Gordon är en begåvad och fullständigt opålitlig ung amerikansk poet på stipendievistelse i Madrid. Tanken är att han ska forska, men han ägnar det mesta av sin vakna tid åt att röka hasch och att driva omkring. Han är en främling i staden och i språket, men osäkerheten kring den egna identiteten går djupare än så och berör själva kärnan i hans verksamhet. Adams »forskning« kommer allt mer att handla om själva tillvaron. Och under detta gror misstanken om att alla hans relationer, ja hela hans liv, är en lika utstuderad bluff som den poesi han skriver.

På väg från Atocha är en mycket rolig roman om konstens och konstnärens plats i vårt senmoderna samhälle. Ben Lerners debutroman har hyllats över hela världen där den kommit ut.

Ben Lerner (född i Kansas 1979) är författare till två hyllade romaner, Leaving the Atocha Station(2011) och 10:04 (2014). Han inledde sin bana som poet och har utgivit tre diktsamlingar. Essän The Hatred of Poetry kom 2016 och finns på svenska som Varför alla hatar poesi. I den resonerar Lerner vidare kring poesins ställning i dag.

Ett verk så självlysande originellt till stil och form att det framstår som ett förebud, en komet från framtiden.

Geoff Dyer i The Guardian

Otroligt rolig och knastrande intelligent, helt levande och säregen i varje mening.

Jonathan Franzen

En enastående roman om skärningspunkterna mellan konsten och verkligheten i vår samtid.

John Ashbery 

”En fantastisk roman, och ett av samtidens mest intressanta författarskap”Svenska Dagbladet

”Ben Lerner lyckas med sitt innovativa språk skapa ett enormt skickligt romanbygge som gör vardagen och alla dess detaljer livsviktiga och intressanta. Han befinner sig helhjärtat inne i huvudet på de olika romanfigurerna.”Sydsvenskan

Topeka, Kansas, sent nittiotal. I centrum står highschool­studenten Adam Gordon och hans föräldrar Jane och Jonathan som båda arbetar på den välrenommerade psykiatriska institution som lockar folk från hela världen. Härifrån spinns trådar bakåt och framåt i tiden. Från föräldrarnas uppväxt och första möte till dagsaktuella demonstrationer mot uppslitande scener vid den mexikan­ska gränsen. Från att känna begär till sin nästas hustru till en fatal biljardboll i en källare.

Topekaskolan är ett magnetiskt drama om åtrå, psyko­terapi och unga arga män. Om förträngda familjehemlig­heter, karriär och ordens förvillande makt.

Språkligt självlysande och med svart humor visar Ben Lerner med sin nya roman att han är en av de främsta för­fattarna av idag.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZEONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEARA TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEARONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeWinner 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 RightAdam 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.

Winner of the Orwell PrizeNamed a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New York TimesFrom "the most talented writer of his generation" (Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine), 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 the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of Covid, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but summoning the intensity of a seance, Lerner's writing shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

»Ett verk så självlysande originellt till stil och form att det framstår som ett förebud, en komet från framtiden.«Geoff Dyer i The Guardian

»Otroligt rolig och knastrande intelligent, helt levande och säregen i varje mening.«Jonathan Franzen

»En enastående roman om skärningspunkterna mellan konsten och verkligheten i vår samtid.«John Ashbery Adam Gordon är en begåvad och fullständigt opålitlig ung amerikansk poet på stipendievistelse i Madrid. Tanken är att han ska forska, men han ägnar det mesta av sin vakna tid åt att röka hasch och att driva omkring. Han är en främling i staden och i språket, men osäkerheten kring den egna identiteten går djupare än så och berör själva kärnan i hans verksamhet. Adams »forskning«

kommer allt mer att handla om själva tillvaron. Och under detta gror misstanken om att alla hans relationer, ja hela hans liv, är en lika utstuderad bluff som den poesi han skriver.

På väg från Atocha är en mycket rolig roman om konstens och konstnärens plats i vårt senmoderna samhälle. Ben Lerners debutroman har hyllats över hela världen där den kommit ut.

Ben Lerner (född i Kansas 1979) är författare till två hyllade romaner, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) och 10:04 (2014). Han inledde sin bana som poet och har utgivit tre diktsamlingar. Essän The Hatred of Poetry kom 2016 och finnspå svenska som Varför alla hatar poesi. I den resonerar Lerner vidarekring poesins ställning i dag.

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

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

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

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.

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZEONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEARA TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEARONE OF BARACK OBAMA''S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeWinner 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 RightAdam 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.

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