Leaving the Atocha Station

Ben Lerner

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English

Coffee House Press
23 August 2011

Fiction & Literature; Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

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.

Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Mnster fr Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

By: Ben Lerner
Imprint: Coffee House Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 228mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 232g
ISBN: 9781566892742
ISBN 10: 1566892740
Pages: 181
Publication Date: 23 August 2011
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Reviews for Leaving the Atocha Station

<br> [A] noteworthy debut . . . . Lerner has fun with the interplay between the unreliable spoken word and subtleties in speech and body language, capturing the struggle of a young artist unsure of the meaning or value of his art. . . . Lerner succeeds in drawing out the problems inherent in art, expectation, and communication. And his Adam is a complex creation, relatable but unreliable, humorous but sad, at once a young man adrift and an artist intensely invested in his surroundings. -- Publishers Weekly <br> A hilarious and insightful account of an artist's development in the digital age. -- Electric Literature <br> I admire Ben's poetry, but I love to death his new book, Leaving the Atocha Station. Ben Lerner's novel . . . 'chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling. . .' [A] significant book. --David Shields, Los Angeles Review of Books <br> One of the Top 10 of 2011. . . . [ Leaving the Atocha Station ] is remarkable for its ability to be