There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page. has a beguiling mixture of lightness and weight. subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel. Work in Progress, 'FSG's Favorite Book of 2012' The Guardian, 'book I wish I'd published' by Canongate publisher Jamie Byng The Huffington Post 'Yet Another Year-End List' The New Yorker’s Best of the Year in Culture 2011 Wall Street Journal’s Top 10 Fiction of 2011

Runner-Up for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literatureįinalist for the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction)įinalist for The New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award

Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.įinalist for the 2013 James Tait Black Prize in fiction In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie.

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. 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.īorn 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. 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.

Leaving the atocha station