Ben Lerner – författare

'Smart and subtle... You'll read it, then want to read it again' - GQA writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he 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 a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on SundayA hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art. Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways.One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse.'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer

Shortlisted for the Folio PrizeInternationally celebrated by critics and readers alikeA dazzling and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empireIn 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.'Brilliant... Contemplative and tender... I doubt I'll read a finer novel this year' - Sunday Telegraph'Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start' - Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he 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 a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on SundayA hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art. Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways.One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse.'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer

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 

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Your body is by God. God preprogrammed you to look great, have outrageous health, and experience incredible happiness. In the human body, God created a perfect design, equipped with all the organs, tissues, and cells necessary for health, production, and reproduction. The problem, asserts Dr. Ben Lerner, is when we as humans interfere with God's design for our bodies. Junk food, high-stress living, and neglecting exercise are just a few of the things we do to hinder our bodies' performance.In Body by God, Dr. Lerner offers a comprehensive plan for getting in touch with our bodies in four areas: nutrition, exercise, stress management, and time management. His "5-in-5" plan is designed to instill the good habits that will lead to optimum health benefits. Readers will learn how to get in shape with 10-minute workouts, reprogram the way they react to stress, and more. "Owner's Manual Tips" give specific ways to apply the material to real life. Our bodies are "fearfully and wonderfully made." With the help of Body by God, readers will learn how to achieve the highest level of performance from God's handiwork.

Childhood is a pivotal time for good nutrition. Organs and blood streams nurtured with junk food cannot build a foundation for good health and longevity as an adult. Drs. Joseph Mercola and Ben Lerner believe profound inactivity, addiction to electronic media, and diets of super-sized fast food and sugar-laden beverages have created a national emergency. Generation XL is a clarion call and a detailed guide to giving your child a vibrant, successful future and a healthy, wholesome, invigorating youth.As children riddled with pain, illness, learning disorders, and even depression begin to show up everywhere, rather than looking at brain development, nutrition, and lack of movement as the culprits, concerned parents are turning to more and more medications. Think about that. Is that how we were designed? To make medication a way of life and to be drugged early on a consistent basis?What does the future hold for us when kids are overweight, out of shape, and taking medications for the effects? What kind of children are we creating?This is not a diet book-far, far from it. Dropping another diet book into the same culture will do nothing but take up more room on your shelf. Generation XL shows you how kids were created to eat, breathe, sleep, run, and live. At the same time, Drs. Mercola and Lerner help you change your family culture and recognize where the culture around you isn't working so you can avoid it or help to change it.Since prevention is always easier (and wiser) than cure, incorporating the lifestyle changes suggested in Generation XL gives your child a realistic way to reach and maintain a healthy weight; dramatically reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other health risks; and build a strong body and positive mental attitude, maximizing his or her IQ and giving the best chance for success.

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence 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.

The highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry, edited by Ian Williams, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Griffin Poetry Prize finalist. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Each year, the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner's three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S BOOKS OF THE YEAR'I think the future of the novel is here' Sally Rooney'A hugely moving American masterpiece' Max PorterAdam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97, the son of two psychologists. He is a renowned debater and orator, an aspiring poet, and - although it requires a lot of posturing and weight lifting - one of the cool kids, but he's also one of the seniors who brings a loner, Darren Eberheart, into the social scene, with disastrous effects. The Topeka School is a riveting story about the challenges of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a startling prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the tyranny of trolls and the new right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men. 'His most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date... Deeply inspired' Maggie Nelson

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 defence 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.

From the celebrated author of The Topeka School, a collection of poetry that is dazzlingly intelligent, moving and speaks directly to our complex times.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.