Leaving the Atocha Station - by Ben Lerner (Paperback)

About the Book

From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the angst of the young American abroad.

Book Synopsis

From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the angst of the young American abroad.

Review Quotes

Finalist for the 2013 James Tait Black Prize in fiction

Runner-Up for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Winner of The 2012 Believer Book Award

Finalist for the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction)

Finalist for The New York Public Library's 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award

Wall Street Journal's Top 10 Fiction of 2011
The New Yorker's Best of the Year in Culture 2011
Newsweek/Daily Beast's Best of 2011
The Boston Globe's Best of 2011
The Guardian's Best Books of 2011
Shelf Unbound's Top Ten of 2011
New Stateman's Best Books of 2011

The Huffington Post "Yet Another Year-End List"
The Guardian, "book I wish I'd published" by Canongate publisher Jamie Byng
Work in Progress, "FSG's Favorite Book of 2012"

"[A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel. . . . [Leaving the Atocha Station] has a beguiling mixture of lightness and weight. There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page. Lerner is attempting to capture something that most conventional novels, with their cumbersome caravans of plot and scene and "conflict," fail to do: the drift of thought, the unmomentous passage of undramatic life. . . ."--James Wood, The New Yorker

"Ben 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 . . . Lerner is concerned with ineffability, but Adam Gordon (and the author) fight back with more than words . . . The ultimate product of Gordon's success is the novel itself." -Gary Sernovitz, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation. . . . [A] dazzlingly good novel."--Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books

"Flip, hip, smart, and very funny . . . [R]eading it was unlike any other novel-reading experience I've had for a long time." --Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross"

"[Leaving the Atocha Station is] hilarious and cracklingly intelligent, fully alive and original in every sentence, and abuzz with the feel of our late-late-modern moment. . . . --Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian's Books of the Year 2011

"[A] remarkable first novel . . . intensely and unusually brilliant."--The Guardian

"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

"Leaving the Atocha Station is a marvelous 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."--The Wall Street Journal

"One of the strengths of Leaving the Atocha Station is how it absorbs these radical impulses without compromising narrative shape and speed...More Important, however, this blending--of perception and politics--comes right out of how Lerner sees the world in real life."--Electric Literature

"Lerner's prose, at once precise and swerving, propels the book in lieu of a plot and creates an experience of something [main character Adam] Gordon criticizes more heavily plotted books of failing to capture: "the texture of time as it passed, life's white machine."--The Daily Beast

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.