We're thrilled to welcome back Ben Lerner to discuss his playful and moving new novel, Transcription. I

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The forty-five-year-old writer, father of one, and narrator of Ben Lerner's new novel has travelled to Providence, where he went to college, and where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor, and father of his friend, Max. But after the narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas's house with no recording device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess. What unfolds from this dreamlike, nightmarish, circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate the memories that make us who we are, and a moving exploration of the experience of being a son, of becoming a man, and of trying to be a good father.

In this fourth novel all of Lerner’s many gifts – his sharp insight, his intellect, his playfulness and emotional acuity – are firmly on display, to astounding effect.

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Ben Lerner was born in 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, as well as multiple poetry collections. In 2011, he became the first American to win the Munster Prize for International Poetry, and is widely considered one of the most important American novelists writing today. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.