In an interview with Andrew Marantz, the novelist and poet Ben Lerner discusses how smartphones “charge the air around us,” what fiction can record that a transcript can’t, and why the book is also a ...

In 2024, Ben Lerner was asked if he wanted to interview one of his mentors, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop, for The Paris Review. “I was really ambivalent about it,” Lerner told me. “Rosmarie is amazing.

In 2024, the Paris Review published an interview that Ben Lerner conducted with 90-year-old poet Rosemarie Waldrop over the ...

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” a six-volume novel that deployed minutely detailed descriptions of the mundane (making tea, changing a diaper) in a refusal to obscure reality, became a global ...

At the start of Ben Lerner's startling new novel "Transcription," a man sits on a train trying to read and failing because he ...

His most experimental and unsettling book, Transcription is about a set of writers who are tormented by the question of whether art is futile or the most important weapon we have. Ben Lerner writes ...

Staff Picks returns this spring with selections from News Editor Drew Gillis, who just devoured Ben Lerner’s latest novel, and Games Editor Garrett Martin, who spotlights an indie game with a unique ...

Transcription By Ben Lerner Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25, 144 pages As we scroll through the final portion of human history ...

In The Topeka School (2019), for example, a married middle-aged man beginning an affair is at the same time the teenage boy ...

The new book is already being called one of the best releases of 2026.

In a short story called “Wireless,” published in Scribner’s in 1901, Rudyard Kipling described “a glass tube” with “two tiny ...

This article appears in the May 2026 print edition with the headline “The Feeling of Becoming Less and Less of a Person.” ...