A radical new take on the American family saga from a bona fide American literary genius, the acclaimed author of Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04
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 two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. He has published the poetry collections The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award) and Mean Free Path and No Art 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.
Fiercely intelligent but underpinned by great sympathy, it's one of
the most haunting pieces of prose I've read for a long time.
*Guardian*
Ben Lerner has redefined what it means for a writer to inhabit an
American present by showing how a family reckons with its past.
Here the personal and political are masterfully interwoven. The
Topeka School is brave, furious, and finally a work of love
*Ocean Vuong*
The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning,
ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his
most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date.
It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other
minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into
new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory
of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the
kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel
well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired
*Maggie Nelson*
In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the
late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present.
The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects
but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises.
In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner
lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences.
What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for
belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is
Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet
*Citizen: An American Lyric*
Ben Lerner is one of my favorite living writers
*Rachel Kushner*
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