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Also by Ben Lerner:

Transcription, April 2026
Hardcover / e-Book
10:04: A Novel, September 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Leaving The Atocha Station, September 2011
Paperback / e-Book
Maximized Living Bible, January 2007
Paperback
Body by God, November 2003
Hardcover

LEAVING THE ATOCHA STATION
By: Ben Lerner

Coffee House Press
September 2011
On Sale: September 13, 2011
186 pages
ISBN: 1566892740
EAN: 9781566892742
Kindle: B005IQBXTI
Paperback / e-Book
Add to Wish List

Fiction Family Life

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.

Media Buzz

Fresh Air - NPR - November 9, 2011