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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 JohnsonTranscription 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 moreTranscription 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 *

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 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.