Ben Lerner

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...

Food can bring together families, communities, and cultures. It is the essence of life and yet our relationships with one another can be most fraught at the dinner table. This perpetually fascinating subject has inspired a unique collection of fiction-including flash fiction, essay, short stories, and even a "stoku" (amalgam of short story and haiku)-from a wonderfully diverse and international group of authors. The authors in the anthology include...

"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,...

"Letters between two sisters who grew up in Nazi Germany, explore their family history and assess their complicity with Nazism" --

"A book of interviews and selected writings by Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop, edited by Ben Lerner"--