Transcription

Transcription 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

At 144 pages, Ben Lerner's Transcription has a slightness that may surprise some of his admirers. The more I read, however, the more deliberate it felt: a novel about technology, kept short enough for even the most internet-addled mind to finish in an afternoon. The story is rather simple...yet Lerner turns this banal inciting incident into a brilliant philosophical meditation on what happens when we outsource our memories to our devices

Frieze

Quietly provocative and thoughtful

International Times

Lerner combines fiction and criticism to postulate both a novel vision of the social possibilities of art and the artistic possibilities of socialising

Review31

Smartphones have become so integral to our lives, really external hard drives to brains and souls, that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete's command of different, overlapping genres, is winning

New York Times

The novel is about fiction and our relationship with our devices and the powerlessness that we feel in middle age in the face of our elders and our children... Bewitching

Sunday Times

A breathtaking interrogation of family, connection and memory... Transcription reveals itself as more, far more, than an anthropology of digital modernity

Guardian

Cerebral yet tender

Literary Review

There have been other notable attempts to pin down the doubleness, the contrarily engaged and dissociative elsewhereness of our lives online... No contemporary writer, however, is better on the complexities of this subject than Ben Lerner

Times Literary Supplement

A slim but nifty affair about our contemporary reliance, our reflex use, of the mobile phone

Tablet

Intriguing... A meditation on generational memory, the collective consciousness, and more. If that sounds convoluted, it isn't. In Lerner's hands, it is smart, bold, funny and clever. How does he do it?

Marie Claire

A haunting story about fatherhood and middle age... Some of Lerner's most brilliant and daring writing to date, a mad oracular burst of speech - about technology, parenthood, and dreaming - that flits effortlessly between prose and poetry

Vulture

Remarkable... By turns slapstick and sincere... From book to book, [Lerner's] writing crackles with new insights

Harper's

Compelling... There is enough strangeness and unpredictability baked into the form that it bears and rewards rereading. Each time something new makes sense and something else unravels

ArtReview

Lerner conjures a remarkable meditation on memory, communication and what the narrator at one point calls "technologies of capture"... Transcription is a formidable addition to his already stellar body of work

Irish Independent

A masterful, uncanny exploration of technology and memory

Guardian

Slender and subtle

LRB

Playful... Heart-wrenching... Dizzyingly precise

Morning Star

A thought-provoking, emotional, and challenging story that consumes the reader... It's like nothing you'll have read before, and is hard to forget once completed

PA

Few books so aptly capture the weirdness of being flanked by two mutually incomprehensible generations-tech-illiterate elders on the one hand and digital natives on the other-and the mental gymnastics involved in liaising between them... Brilliant

n+1

Touchingly human... Our sense of what and who we know is upended

Saturday Paper

Remarkable... Transcription never stops asking whether technology corrodes authentic experience. But this ultimately leaves us with a different question: whether it can also carry what we most want to pass on

Jacobin

America's most acclaimed novelist... Transcription silences any doubts about the Lerner hype

GQ

This slender novel packs a lot in... [Lerner's] most moving novel yet, with a tender message about human frailty at its core that lingers long after the book's end

AnOther

Anxieties, mostly earnest, permeate its pages, but this is not Lerner's contribution to the "techlash". It's a book that trades in thought-provoking ambiguities and intellectual nuance... The yet-to-be-deleted truth is that fiction such as his keeps us connected to reality in ways that even functioning smartphones cannot

Irish Times

Brilliant... A tour de force

New Statesman

Brilliantly rendered... A coolly brilliant novel that demands to be read again, and again, and again

Daily Mail

I've read this short, glittering novel three times now and found new things to admire in it each time. Lerner is a magician. Even when he shows you how the trick is performed, you wonder how he does it

Spectator

Poignant... This is a story of crossed wires, disconnection and anxious attachments - to fathers, father figures and digital comfort blankets

Irish Times

Beautifully observed... This is an immensely satisfying read: a philosophical puzzle-box of a story that you'll read in an evening but ponder over for much longer than that

Bookmunch

Transcription isn't the kind of novel that you finish reading, not really. The more it percolates in your mind, the more sure you become that its author, the American writer Ben Lerner, is a bit of a genius... Quite stunning

Shortlist

Riveting... Some brilliant passages showcase Lerner's gifts of narrative timing, not least a bruisingly bittersweet account of deathbed goodbyes over the phone during lockdown

Observer

Lerner is always excellent on the knots our brains tie us in

The Critic

Lerner's sentences are finely attuned to the phone's subtle rewiring of consciousness

ArtReview

Beguiling... Transcription blossoms as you re-read it: the more you scrutinize its plain surface the more pattern and artifice you see... Dreamlike

New Left Review

A compact, conceptual fable... Both tender and exacting-a meditation on intergenerational exchange in an age when everything is recorded and nothing, quite, is kept

Hauser & Wirth