Лучшие книги Бена Лернера

Тридцатипятилетний Бен Лернер — один из самых интересных молодых писателей США. Три его поэтических сборника удостоены престижных премий, а первый роман признан лучшей книгой года многими авторитетными журналами. Действие его второго романа “22:04” происходит в сотрясаемом ураганами Нью-Йорке. Начинающий писатель почти одновременно узнаёт о головокружительном успехе…

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.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore." Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes,"than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communalexistence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocationno less essential for being impossible.

From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the new right. Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of 1997. His mother, Jane,…

Рассказ опубликован в журнале "The New Yorker" в выпуске за 3 апреля 2023.