Stories of escape, abduction, friendship, growth and crisis make up The New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2019, announced November 22. The Times’s fiction picks include Ben Lerner’s “The Topeka School,” the writer’s third novel. In it, Lerner, through the voices of several characters, evokes the Kansas of his Clinton-era late adolescence. The novel’s…
John Ashbery was among the very greatest poets of the postwar era, one of the most imaginative and accurate chroniclers of what he called “the experience of experience.” But he might have blanched to hear himself spoken of in such portentous, non-poetic terms. Following Ashbery’s passing on September 3, his friends and acolytes offered reminiscences…
Ben Lerner, 36, began his writing career as a poet, but his two debut novels, one published in 2011 and the other last year, quickly gained critical acclaim and have both been called “brilliant” and “revolutionary,” among other praise. This year Lerner received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship of $625,000 for his work. Though he has…
At least three Jews and one Jewish studies professor are among this year’s 24 winners of $625,000 MacArthur grants for so-called geniuses. Author Ben Lerner, environmental health advocate Gary Cohen, artist Nicole Eisenman and Princeton professor Marina Rustow, who teaches Jewish studies and is an expert on the Cairo genizah, are in the 2015 group…
● 10:04 By Ben Lerner 256 pages, Faber and Faber, $25 What is a novel? What purpose does it serve? In what way does the novel engage with the reader and what is the intellectual, emotional, dare I say, ontological texture of the exchange between the two? How much fidelity must a novel show to…
Leaving the Atocha Station By Ben Lerner Coffee House Press, 186 pages, $15 A novel by a poet differs from a mere novel: It’s a grander affair, an occasion. A reader has many expectations of “a poet’s novel”: an exceptional attention to language, singular imagery and a deeper probing into anything soul-related (certainly deeper than…
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