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. What is actual when our
experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the
arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the
reader's projections? 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? 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.
Born in Topeka, 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 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. _Leaving the Atocha Station_ is his first
novel.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781566892926
Publisert
2017
Utgiver
Vendor
Coffee House Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter