Transcription
2799
Transcription
2799
The narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and the father of his college friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand -- Daisy Johnson
Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more
Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender - an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now -- Sophie Mackintosh
'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner ... is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why * Telegraph *
Puzzle-like... a smart and subtle meditation on technology, memory and the Covid pandemic, as well as a very human story about family and fatherhood. You'll read it, then want to read it again * GQ *
A Lerner novel is always an event * FT *
[Poses] daunting questions about how we process information and what memory is * AnOther *
A layered exploration of memory, masculinity and technology * Mail on Sunday *
A powerfully distilled novel about fathers and sons, mortality and inheritance and the technologies shaping our lives * Bookseller *
At 144 pages, Ben Lerner's Transcription has a slightness that may surprise some of his admirers. The more I read, however, the more deliberate it felt: a novel about technology, kept short enough for even the most internet-addled mind to finish in an afternoon. The story is rather simple - a writer drops his phone in the sink just before what will become the last interview with his luddite mentor - yet Lerner turns this banal inciting incident into a brilliant philosophical meditation on what happens when we outsource our memories to our devices * Frieze *
Quietly provocative and thoughtful * International Times *
Lerner combines fiction and criticism to postulate both a novel vision of the social possibilities of art and the artistic possibilities of socialising * Review31 *
As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it's about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life... Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete's command of different, overlapping genres, is winning * New York Times *
What unfolds from this dreamlike circumstance is both the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to each other, that store or obliterate the memories that make us who we are.
Details
ISBN13: 9781803513898
Format: Paperback / softback
Number of Pages: 144
Edition:
Publication Date: 07 Apr 2026
Publisher: Granta Books
Publication City, Country: London, United Kingdom
Dimensions (cm): 21.6(H)x13.5(L)
Weight (gm):
Author Biography
BEN LERNER was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), Mean Free Path,No Art and The Lights, as well as the iconic essay The Hatred of Poetry. In 2011, he became the first American to win the Munster Prize for International Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.Reviews
A short, smart novel about parenthood and influence; about how much of our lives we have ceded to the black rectangles in our pockets * Observer *Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand -- Daisy Johnson
Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more
Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender - an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now -- Sophie Mackintosh
'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner ... is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why * Telegraph *
Puzzle-like... a smart and subtle meditation on technology, memory and the Covid pandemic, as well as a very human story about family and fatherhood. You'll read it, then want to read it again * GQ *
A Lerner novel is always an event * FT *
[Poses] daunting questions about how we process information and what memory is * AnOther *
A layered exploration of memory, masculinity and technology * Mail on Sunday *
A powerfully distilled novel about fathers and sons, mortality and inheritance and the technologies shaping our lives * Bookseller *
At 144 pages, Ben Lerner's Transcription has a slightness that may surprise some of his admirers. The more I read, however, the more deliberate it felt: a novel about technology, kept short enough for even the most internet-addled mind to finish in an afternoon. The story is rather simple - a writer drops his phone in the sink just before what will become the last interview with his luddite mentor - yet Lerner turns this banal inciting incident into a brilliant philosophical meditation on what happens when we outsource our memories to our devices * Frieze *
Quietly provocative and thoughtful * International Times *
Lerner combines fiction and criticism to postulate both a novel vision of the social possibilities of art and the artistic possibilities of socialising * Review31 *
As talky and thinky as a memory play, sweeping up Kafka, Covid, glass flowers and much else in its narrow, rushing stream, it's about how technology can sustain as well as stultify life... Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete's command of different, overlapping genres, is winning * New York Times *