A stunning, urgent, and original novel from Ben Lerner (The Topeka School and Leaving the Atocha Station) about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire.

Winner of The Paris Review's 2012 Terry Southern Prize

A Finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence, Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year By:
The New Yorker The New York Times Book Review The Wall Street Journal The Village Voice The Boston Globe NPR Vanity Fair The Guardian (London) The L Magazine The Times Literary Supplement (London) The Globe and Mail (Toronto) The Huffington Post Gawker Flavorwire San Francisco Chronicle The Kansas City Star The Jewish Daily Forward Tin House

FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE

ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEAR

A TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEAR
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize
Winner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award

ALSO NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Esquire, NPR, Vogue, Amazon, Kirkus, The Times (UK), Buzzfeed, Vanity Fair, The Telegraph (UK), Financial Times (UK), Lit Hub, The Times Literary Supplement (UK), The New York Post, Daily Mail (UK), The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian (UK), Electric Literature, SPY.com, and the New York Public Library

From the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century: a tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting lost boys to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart--who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient--into the social scene, to disastrous effect.

Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, Ben Lerner's The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

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 M nster f r Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and Electric Literature

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.

The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner's poems ultimately communicate--in their unpredictability, in their intensities--the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: I, too, dislike it, wrote Marianne Moore. Many more people agree they hate poetry, Ben Lerner writes, than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and Electric Literature

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.

The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner's poems ultimately communicate--in their unpredictability, in their intensities--the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. Lichtenberg figures are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.

Throughout this playful and elegiac debut--with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique--the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.

Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of No: a journal of the arts. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

Statistically, best-selling author and doctor Ben Lerner should have ended up like his parents--sick, addicted to nicotene and dead of a heart attack or stroke by the time he hit middle age. But from an early age he saw the consequences of poor health choices and made a commitment not to follow in their footsteps.

It is neither genes nor upbringing that makes the difference, he writes. It's choice. You don't have to win a battle of evolution to be healthy.

In Winning the Inside Battle of Wellness, Dr. Ben guides readers on a journey toward total health--mind, body and spirit. Instead of immediately tackling diet, he begins with the mind, uncovering how eating and lifestyle habits can shape the way our brain develops--and how we can harness those same forces to become healthier.

Next, Dr. Ben explores how our personalities and emotional health can impact our wellness and offers practical tools for deeper self-awareness, reshaping the way we think and respond to our environment and relationships. Finally, he addresses the biological impact of various foods and activities on our bodies and offers a roadmap for transforming the way we eat--tricking our bodies into craving the foods that will ensure a long and healthy life.

Complete with dietary charts, exercise plans, recipes and practical tips, Winning the Inside Battle of Wellness will help you overcome the challenges that stand between you and a healthy, fulfilling lifestyle.

Your body is by God. God preprogrammed you to look great, have outrageous health, and experience incredible happiness. In the human body, God created a perfect design, equipped with all the organs, tissues, and cells necessary for health, production, and reproduction. The problem, asserts Dr. Ben Lerner, is when we as humans interfere with God's design for our bodies. Junk food, high-stress living, and neglecting exercise are just a few of the things we do to hinder our bodies' performance.

In Body by God, Dr. Lerner offers a comprehensive plan for getting in touch with our bodies in four areas: nutrition, exercise, stress management, and time management. His 5-in-5 plan is designed to instill the good habits that will lead to optimum health benefits. Readers will learn how to get in shape with 10-minute workouts, reprogram the way they react to stress, and more. Owner's Manual Tips give specific ways to apply the material to real life. Our bodies are fearfully and wonderfully made. With the help of Body by God, readers will learn how to achieve the highest level of performance from God's handiwork.

A successful author, entrepreneur and chiropractor, Dr. Ben Lerner is also a self-described graduate of the school of hard knocks. But if he has his way, you will avoid some of the painful classes he took and chart a course for financial profit and personal growth.
In Zero to a Million, Dr. Lerner shares the proven strategies that allowed him to create successful partnerships with professional and Olympic sports teams, major corporations, megachurches, government, schools, and school systems.
In his comprehensive guide, Dr. Lerner provides practical tools and little-known secrets to starting and growing a business, including topics such as:
- identifying your mission
- maintaining quality and standards in your products and services
- cultivating and protecting your business culture
- communicating your message
- growing your capacity
- navigating the nuts and bolts of finances
- building a team
- much more ...
Ultimately, a business is only as strong as its leader. With a unique perspective, grounded in years of experience, Dr. Lerner guides readers in developing the most crucial aspect of their business--themselves.