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Leaving the Atocha Station
Ben Lerner
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Description for Leaving the Atocha Station
Paperback. Veering between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a dazzling introduction to one of the smartest, funniest and most audacious writers of a generation Num Pages: 192 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 200 x 131 x 12. Weight in Grams: 140.
'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday A hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art. Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as ... Read morefraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways. One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse. 'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer Show Less
Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About Ben Lerner
Born in 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, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Münster State ... Read morePrize for International Poetry. In 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College. This is his first novel. Show Less
Reviews for Leaving the Atocha Station
Gales of laughter howl through [this] remarkable first novel. It's packed full of gags and page-long one-liners... intensely and unusually brilliant
Geoff Dyer
Observer
[This book] stood out from everything else I read this year
Catherine O’Flynn, Books of the Year
Observer
The best new novel I've read for a long time
James ... Read moreMeek Seductively intelligent and stylish writing, mercilessly comic in the ways it strips the creative ego bare
Peter Carty
Independent
Funny, uplifting and moving... Lerner's genius is to put into words that universal, often-lost period when most young people are commitment-free but weighed down with a sense of the nascent self... We finish this book feeling a little cleverer, and a little happier
Isabel Berwick
Financial Times
Wonderful precision and comic timing... Superb
Anthony Cummins
Metro
An anatomy of a generation's uncertainty and self-involvement, the novel offers a carefully constructed snapshot of a nation in doubt... Beautifully written
Stephen J. Burns
Times Literary Supplement
The overall narrative is structured around subtle, delicate moments... They're comic but they're also beautiful and touching and precise
Jenny Turner
Guardian
Hilarious and cracklingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence, and abuzz with the feel of our late-late-modern moment
Jonathan Franzen
Guardian, Books of the Year 2011
[A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel. . . . [with] a beguiling mixture of lightness and weight. There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page
James Wood
New Yorker
One of the most talked-about fiction debuts this year, it's a book for anyone who's ever been young and self-conscious in a foreign city. The Spanish travails (or lack of them) of Lerner's preening poet narrator are painful, well-observed and often very funny
Hari Kunzru One of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation. . . . [A] dazzlingly good novel
Lorin Stein
New York Review of Books
A dazzling first novel that does not flinch from difficulty but asks questions of language and art and what we can do with them
Amy Sackville, Books of the Year
Big Issue
Utterly charming. Lerner's self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly and hilariously all his own
Paul Auster I love to death Ben Lerner's novel . . . [A] significant book
David Shields
Los Angeles Review of Books
A marvellous novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully dimensional and compelling character
Wall Street Journal
A slightly deranged, philosophically inclined monologue in the Continental tradition running from Büchner's Lenz to Thomas Bernhard and Javier Marías. The adoption of this mode by a young American narrator-solipsistic, overmedicated, feckless yet ambitious-ends up feeling like the most natural thing in the world
Benjamin Kunkel
New Statesman, Best Books of 2011
Lerner's remarkable first novel is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it's like to be a young American abroad... for America, the path from The Sun Also Rises to Leaving the Atocha Station seems frighteningly downward
Gary Sernovitz
New York Times Book Review
This debut has already created quite a stir in the US. Jonathan Franzen is a fan ("hilarious and crackingly intelligent") as is Paul Auster
Alice O’Keeffe
Bookseller
Billy Liar as written by Proust
Tom Sutcliffe
BBC Radio 4's Saturday Review
Hugely entertaining
Liz Jensen The author's poetic skills and sandpaper-dry humour mounted a charm offensive
Skinny
An extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life
John Ashbery [In this] short but potent novel . . . Lerner sets up profound questions about the possibilities of art and human experience . . . beguiling
Andrew Staffell
The Times
An odd, utterly distinctive book... I do recommend it
Tom Sutcliffe
Independent
Lerner conveys, with the lightest of touches, the wordly truth that the truly profound and totally mundane are sometimes feather-width apart
Newcastle Evening Chronicle
One of the most remarkable books I have read this year... Lerner's poetry manifests itself in elegantly stilted grammar, in contradiction and self-cancellation, in painfully self-aware self-mirroring and especially in misunderstanding... The camber of Adam's thoughts is conveyed with astonishing grace
Stuart Kelly
Scotsman
A thoroughly first-rate first novel: properly cutting edge, searingly clever and dark and beautiful
Stuart Hammond
Dazed & Confused
I was amused and appalled by the anti-hero
David Nicholls, Books of the Year
Guardian
A refined comedy
Jonathan Derbyshire, Books of the Year
New Statesman
The sharpest and funniest novel I have read this year
Craig Brown, Books of the Year
Mail on Sunday
At its core, it's a deeply serious novel that - almost by stealth - makes you think afresh about all those late night imponderables to do with art and the meaning of life... A stunning debut
Metro
Acclaimed debut novel that follows the fortunes of an alienated, self-medicating American poetry student living in Madrid
Observer
This arrestingly clever debut novel blends lyricism, wit and emotional self-laceration
Sunday Telegraph
Very funny... One of the most acclaimed debut novels of 2012
Evening Standard
Lerner is a multi-form talent who crosses genres, modes, and media... one of the most important young writers working today
Contemporary Literature
One of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of
Lorin Stein, editor
Paris Review
Clever, funny and beautifully written, I enjoyed every page
Christmas Book Recommendations, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Foyles website
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