Leaving the Atocha Station
Regular price
€16.99
'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
A hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art.
Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways.
One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse.
'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer
Born in Kansas in 1979, BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry, The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Münster State Prize for International Poetry. In 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College. This is his first novel.