Ben Lerner
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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: But then again, why do I need the narrator to…
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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 making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some…
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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; Community Bookstore; The Strand; BookCulture; Astoria Bookshop. Emma Straub, Jami…
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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 novel. Laughter is physical; it involves the body of the…
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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 among some poets that writing in prose is a capitulation…
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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 concentrated way” and why this might be the case: If…
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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 is immanent whether or not it’s imminent, that the world…
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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 didn’t obtain,” [Lerner] says, “how the correspondence between text and…
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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 numbness and identitylessness.” In the Parul Sehgal’s piece, the author…
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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, Wendy Lotterman, Nicole Steinberg, Sarah V. Schweig, Ted Dodson, Krystal…
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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 of meaning.” Ben Lerner, poet and author of Leaving the…