Learning to Love
Maybe the best reading leads us to struggle with ourselves. Jennifer Audette writes about the messiness of learning to love the metafiction of Ben Lerner for the Fiction Writer’s Review:…
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Ben Lerner
38 posts
Reading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are…
Notable NYC: 5/2–5/8
Saturday 5/2: Independent Bookstore Day: Events are being held throughout the day at your neighborhood bookstore. The following stores are hosting special events: WORD; Housing Works; McNally Jackson; Greenlight Bookstore; BookCourt;…
The Art of Literature
Literature often depends on the strategic disappointment of expectation. Sometimes, the effect of that is humorous; at other times, it’s unnerving: I consider it crucial to the composition of a…
When Poets Become Novelists
Ben Lerner talks with the Guardian about life in Brooklyn, octopuses, and poets: “Poets really haven’t gotten the news that the novel is also dead,” he says, of the opinion…
An Inconvenient Fiction
Invoking his new play, Buzz, Benjamin Kunkel writes in the New Yorker about how “few imaginative writers have dealt with the present-day experience of global warming in a direct and…
Re-Referencing the Self
When Tao Lin asked Ben Lerner about his new novel’s epigraph, Lerner touched on the merits of the parable: I think the parable is a peculiar way of saying that redemption…
Word of the Day: Atelier
(n.); artist’s studio or workshop; c. 1840, from the old French astelier (“carpenter’s workshop, woodpile”) “Part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction…
Another Station
When the The New York Times asked for his background, Ben Lerner answered the best he could: “Suburban-white-kid crime, Columbine High School sort of thing,” he said. “A violence of…
Notable NYC: 3/8–3/14
Saturday 3/8: Ben Marcus talks about his new story collection, Leaving the Sea (January 2014), Rob Spillman, editor of Tin House. Brooklyn Public Library, 4 p.m., free. Craig Morgan Teicher,…
Ben Lerner in The New Yorker
“In the name of clarity, a lot of authors offer what strike me as basically pre-fabricated structures of feeling, leaving no room for the reader to participate in the construction…