Leaving the Atocha Station

From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time.

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. 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? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? 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.

Publication date: August 23, 2011

Format: Trade Paper

Dimensions: 6 x 9

Page count: 186 pages

ISBN: 9781566892742

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.

His debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, New York Magazine, and many others, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award.

Winner of the 2012 Believer Book Award

Runner-Up for the 2013 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Finalist for the 2013 James Tait Black Prize in Fiction

Finalist for the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Finalist for the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award

A Wall Street Journal Top Ten Fiction of 2011

A Boston Globe Best Novel of 2011

A Guardian Best Book of 2011

A Shelf Unbound Top Ten Book of 2011

A Literary Hub Best Contemporary Novel

“Ben Lerner’s remarkable first novel . . . is a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice. It is also a revealing study of what it's like to be a young American abroad.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“One of the funniest (and truest) novels I know of by a writer of his generation. . . . A dazzlingly good novel.” 

—New York Review of Books

“A subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel.”

—The New Yorker

“Flip, hip, smart, and very funny. . . . Reading it was unlike any other novel-reading experience I’ve had for a long time.”

—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

“A remarkable first novel. . . . Intensely and unusually brilliant.”

—The Guardian

“Utterly charming. Lerner’s self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly and hilariously all his own.”

—Paul Auster

“A marvelous novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully dimensional and compelling character.” 

—The Wall Street Journal

“A darkly hilarious examination of just how self-conscious, miserable, and absurd one man can be.”

—Deb Olin Unferth, Bookforum

“A post-MFA The Catcher in the Rye for professional adolescents.” 

—San Diego CityBeat

“The combination of tension and languor, grounded by sensual details, recalls Javier Marías.”

—Time Out New York

“An extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life.”

—John Ashbery

“The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year.”

—The Daily Mail

“Leaving the Atocha Station gets to the heart of this fact of our existence. It captures the complex relationship we have with art, with faith, with love, and with life, and it does so with wit, honesty and grace.”

—HuffPost