Ben Lerner

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.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam’s "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.

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, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

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.

In his bold second book, Ben Lerner molds philosophical insight, political outrage, and personal experience into a devastating critique of mass society. Angle of Yaw investigates the fate of public space, public speech, and how the technologies of viewing—aerial photography in particular—feed our culture an image of itself. And it’s a spectacular view.The man observes the action on the field with the tiny television he brought to the stadium. He is topless, painted gold, bewigged. His exaggerated foam index finger indicates the giant screen upon which his own image is now displayed, a model of fanaticism. He watches the image of his watching the image on his portable TV on his portable TV. He suddenly stands with arms upraised and initiates the wave that will consume him.Haunted by our current “war on terror,” much of the book was written while Lerner was living in Madrid (at the time of the Atocha bombings and their political aftermath), as the author steeped himself in the history of Franco and fascism. Regardless of when or where it was written, Angle of Yaw will further establish Ben Lerner as one of our most intriguing and least predictable poets.

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning. Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility. Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

National Book Award finalist Ben Lerner turns to science once again for his guiding metaphor. “Mean free path” is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner’s third collection are full of layered collisions—repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations—that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there’s the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.You startled me. I thought you were sleepingIn the traditional sense. I like lookingAt anything under glass, especiallyGlass. You called me. Like overheardDreams. I’m writing this one as a womanComfortable with failure. I promise I will neverBut the predicate withered. If you areUncomfortable seeing this as portraitureClose your eyes. No, you startledBen Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

A 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.

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.

“I started to narrate my choking to myself, as if transforming it into a story would keep me connected to a future in which I might tell it.”

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), 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 both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Haunted by Kafka (there are echoes of “The Judgement” and “A Hunger Artist”), but utterly contemporary, Lerner combines trenchant insight with lyric mystery. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

Selección de poemas de The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), Mean Free Path (2010) y poemas inéditos.

Literary journal edited by Ben Lerner and being taken over by Hugh Behm-Steinberg.

Dopo Il mondo a venire e Topeka School, un altro gioiello di uno degli autori più importanti della scena americana, un libro cesellato per più di quindici anni e già considerato dalla stampa statunitense una lettura essenziale.«Le luci potrebbe essere la migliore vetrina per l’insieme dei temi di è un libro in bilico tra l’enigma della prosa e della poesia, del discorso pubblico e di quello privato, del passato e del presente».The Washington Post

This book tracks the relationship between binary code and Leibniz’s Monadology; the technological and cosmological aspects of non-Western writing systems; and the power of the alphabet song.

Statistically, best-selling author and doctor Ben Lerner should have ended up like his parents—sick, addicted to nicotene and dead of a heart attack or stroke by the time he hit middle age. But from an early age he saw the consequences of poor health choices and made a commitment not to follow in their footsteps. “It is neither genes nor upbringing that makes the difference,” he writes. “It’s choice. You don’t have to win a battle of evolution to be healthy.” In Winning the Inside Battle of Wellness, Dr. Ben guides readers on a journey toward total health—mind, body and spirit. Instead of immediately tackling diet, he begins with the mind, uncovering how eating and lifestyle habits can shape the way our brain develops—and how we can harness those same forces to become healthier. Next, Dr. Ben explores how our personalities and emotional health can impact our wellness and offers practical tools for deeper self-awareness, reshaping the way we think and respond to our environment and relationships. Finally, he addresses the biological impact of various foods and activities on our bodies and offers a roadmap for transforming the way we eat—tricking our bodies into craving the foods that will ensure a long and healthy life. Complete with dietary charts, exercise plans, recipes and practical tips, Winning the Inside Battle of Wellness will help you overcome the challenges that stand between you and a healthy, fulfilling lifestyle.

En 1979, Honecker, dirigeant de la RDA, et Brejnev, chef de l’U.R.S.S., se donnent un baiser sur la bouche. La photographie de ce « baiser de la fraternité socialiste » fait le tour du monde. En 2016, une artiste d’origine polonaise, Sonia, le reproduit en peinture. Une exposition de ses toiles sur ce motif doit ouvrir ses portes dans une galerie à New York. Or, deux toiles présentent des coulures sur leurs bords que Sonia souhaite effacer avant le vernissage. Elle les embarque dans un Uber. Mais… Patatras ! Elle les y oublie. S’ensuivent des péripéties rocambolesques pour tenter de les retrouver… Or, Uber est un mur infranchissable, inébranlable. Ben Lerner réussit le tour de force de poser des questions politiques à partir d’une histoire presque triviale : un baiser volé.

No more dependence on cold medicines, prescription pills, and anti-depressants. With One-Minute Wellness, you will revitalize every area of your well-being. And the bonus fiction story uniquely illustrates the authors' strategies at work in ordinary lives-a terrific motivator as you optimize your own life.

This study examines a representative sample of the ongoing legal and policy debates surroundingthe United States’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to support or undertake lethal force abroad,particularly with respect to the surveillance and targeting of non-state asymmetric actors. The study also explores technological trends in the development of UAVs for purposes of undertaking force or force-supporting missions, as well as the trajectory of legal and policy developments in response to the use of UAVs, including possible policy consequences of further restricting the use of such platforms.The commentary contained throughout the study is derived in part from interviews with primary sources—drawn from leading think tanks, human rights organizations, technology companies, and academia—representing a range of opinions on the technological feasibility, legality, and policy advisability of deploying UAVs for lethal force purposes. The study also draws extensively on secondary research onthese same questions, from sources across the opinion spectrum.

De verstrooide naamloze verteller van Transcriptie is afgereisd naar een Amerikaanse universiteitsstad om zijn oude mentor te interviewen voor een literair tijdschrift. Deze Thomas, inmiddels negentig, was ooit een heel grote in zijn vak en het wordt vermoedelijk zijn laatste interview. Maar in het hotel gaat het de telefoon van de verteller belandt in de wasbak en begeeft het, waardoor hij geen mogelijkheid meer heeft het gesprek op te nemen. Aangekomen bij Thomas verzwijgt hij dit. Terwijl de oude man in lange, meanderende zinnen zijn verhaal begint, blijft het onopgetekend. Wat volgt is een opeenstapeling van miscommunicatie en misverstanden, een beknopt verhaal van een gezin in crisis, en een droomachtig relaas van Thomas, die de verteller door de war haalt met zijn eigen zoon.