A NEW YORK TIMES, 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critcis 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, 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.

The Topeka School: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

Lerner, Ben

United States

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

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, Lerner's poems ultimately communicate--in their unpredictability, in their intensities--the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

The Lights: Poems

Poetry

Following the international buzz for his debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, comes 10:04, Ben Lerner's electric second novel that blends artistry and wit, intelligence and tenderness. A unique collision between art and life by an extraordinary young writer. For readers of Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti. Leaving the Atocha Station was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels...of his generation" (Lorin Stein, New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now Lerner's second novel departs from Atocha's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that 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 has changed our relation to both our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.

10:04

Literary

MCCLELLAND STEWART

"Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new. 10:04 is a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and vitality." --Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers Leaving the Atocha Station was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels...of his generation" (Lorin Stein, New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now Lerner's second novel departs from Atocha's exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling. In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that 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 has changed our relation to both our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.

Emblem Editions

The Hatred of Poetry

Novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its continued relevance. Poetry. Perhaps Marianne Moore said it best: "I, too, dislike it." What other art takes its marginality as a given, and is so widely bemoaned even by its practitioners? Ben Lerner writes, "Many more people agree they hate poetry 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 plain-spoken essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines both poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato, who famously claimed that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and its greatest practitioners, providing inspired close-readings of Keats, Dickinson, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every 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.

History & Criticism

What if someone promised you he could offer a system sure to produce better health and all-around wellness? And what if he further dared to say he could do this in just one minute a day? You'd say that person was crazy, right?
But Dr. Ben Lerner has done just that. This best-selling author of Body by God is offering a ground-breaking approach to wellness while reorientating the way you look at life and health. And here's the bonus: it's actually two books in one. On the left-hand side of each page is a fictional tale (based in reality) of a chiropractor running a God-centered office, assisting patients who have been disappointed or left behind by the "traditional" health care system. On the other side are the explanations of the technology, lifestyle methods, treatments, and action steps that can take readers to wellness. Once considered "alternative" medicine, chiropractic treatment is now considered part of a balanced approach to health.

One-Minute Wellness: The Natural Health And Happiness System That Never Fails (BODY BY GOD)

Loman, Greg

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Thomas Nelson. Inc.

Generation XL: Raising Healthy, Intelligent Kids in a High-Tech, Junk-Food World

A detailed guide to giving children a vibrant, successful future and a healthy, wholesome, invigorating youth teaches parents about the importance of good nutrition and the profound effects that inactivity, addiction to media, and super-sized and sugar-laden diets can have on their children.

Generation XL: Raising Healthy, Intelligent Kids in a High-tech, Junk-food World

Mercola, Joseph

Medical Books

Nelson Books

No more dependence on cold medicines, prescription pills, and anti-depressants. With One-Minute Wellness, you will revitalize every area of your well-being. And the bonus fiction story uniquely illustrates the authors' strategies at work in ordinary lives-a terrific motivator as you optimize your own life.

One Minute Wellness: The Natural Health and Happiness System That Never Fails

Exercise & Fitness

Thomas Nelson

A detailed guide to giving children a vibrant, successful future and a healthy, wholesome, invigorating youth ; teaches parents about the importance of good nutrition and the profound effects that inactivity, addiction to media, and super-sized and sugar-laden diets can have on their children.

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, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

10:04: A Novel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lerner, Ben. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Lerner, Ben

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Lerner, Ben. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Topeka School: A Novel

The Lights: Poems

10:04

10:04

The Hatred of Poetry

One-Minute Wellness: The Natural Health And Happiness System That Never Fails (BODY BY GOD)

Generation XL: Raising Healthy, Intelligent Kids in a High-tech, Junk-food World

One Minute Wellness: The Natural Health and Happiness System That Never Fails

Generation XL: Raising Healthy, Intelligent Kids in a High-Tech, Junk-Food World

10:04: A Novel