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Leaving The Atocha Station
Ben Lerner
Coffee House Press
September 2011
On Sale: September 13, 2011
186 pages
ISBN: 1566892740
EAN: 9781566892742
Kindle: B005IQBXTI
Paperback / e-Book
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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.
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