Ben Lerner’s tale of three hotels is a lyrical novel of loss and human potential
in 'Transcription,' the celebrated author writes Jewishly of what he finds himself unable to escape
Ben Lerner
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Culture Ben Lerner, Rachel Louise Snyder Round Out New York Times’s 10 Best Books Of 2019
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…
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Culture How Poets And Novelists Are Mourning John Ashbery
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…
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Forward 50 2015 Ben Lerner
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…
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Fast Forward Jews Among MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant Winners
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…
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Culture In ‘10:04,’ Ben Lerner Sings a Song of Himself
● 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…
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Culture Writing Poetically About Spain and Desire
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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