Leaving the Atocha Station by Lerner, Ben

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 M nster f r Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

Author: Ben Lerner
Publisher: Coffee House Press
Published: 08/23/2011
Pages: 186
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.50lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.40w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9781566892742
Award: L.A. Times Book Prize - Finalist
Award: Literary Award - Runner-Up
Award: Saroyan Writing Prize - Finalist
Award: Sami Rohr Prize - Runner-Up

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 07/04/2011
Library Journal 07/01/2011 pg. 72
Booklist 09/15/2011 pg. 24
New Yorker (The) 10/31/2011 pg. 96
New York Review of Books 12/08/2011 pg. 41
New Yorker (The) 12/19/2011 pg. 139
New York Times Book Review 03/11/2012 pg. 31

About the Author
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 Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.