Ben Lerner

Top 10 books about the unknowable | Peter Ho Davies

From William Shakespeare to WG Sebald, these books are written less to dispel mystery than to accept it

Peter Ho Davies

06, Jan, 2021 @12:00 PM

He Who Must Not Be Named: why is Trump unnamed in so many books?

‘The dictator’, ‘this man’, ‘the president’ – over the last four years, authors have gone out of their way to avoid Trump’s name. But why?

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

23, Nov, 2020 @2:17 PM

Top 10 books about creative writing

From linguistics to essays by Zadie Smith and Toni Morrison, poet Anthony Anaxagorou recommends some ‘lateral’ ways in to a demanding craft

Anthony Anaxagorou

14, Oct, 2020 @10:00 AM

Rathbones Folio prize: Zadie Smith makes female-dominated shortlist

Eight books in contention for £30,000 award that has never been won by a woman include Zadie Smith’s story collection Grand Union and poet Fiona Benson’s Vertigo & Ghost

Alison Flood

25, Feb, 2020 @7:20 PM

Is being the 'voice of a generation' a curse or an honour for novelists?

From F Scott Fitzgerald to JD Salinger, Bret Easton Ellis to Sally Rooney, this label has been applied to countless zeitgeisty coming-of-age novels. But is it helpful?

Richard Godwin

21, Feb, 2020 @11:00 AM

Book clinic: what postmodernist writers should I try?

An admirer of Ben Lerner’s highly praised new novel looks for other avant garde avenues to explore

Alex Preston

25, Jan, 2020 @6:00 PM

The hell of individuation and how dancing could be the cure | Brigid Delaney

With our bodies so absent in modern communication, maybe the key to reconnecting as a community lies in the physical

Brigid Delaney

12, Dec, 2019 @5:00 PM

Best fiction of 2019

Exceptional US novels, extraordinary translations and even two Booker winners ... Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan on the celebrated and overlooked books of the year

Justine Jordan

30, Nov, 2019 @8:00 AM

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner review – in a class of its own

Psychoanalysis, rap battles, poetry, school debates: this bravura US autofiction explores language as tool and weapon

Jon Day

08, Nov, 2019 @9:00 AM

The Topeka School by Ben Lerner review – a work of extraordinary intelligence

The knowing US novelist displays a new maturity in this state-of-the-nation novel about violence and public discourse

Alex Preston

05, Nov, 2019 @7:01 AM

'It made me really crazy': Ben Lerner on confronting male rage and family trauma

As the final book in his acclaimed trilogy is published, The Topeka School author reflects on writing as his mother and ‘pompous’ Great American Novels

Lidija Haas

04, Nov, 2019 @9:00 AM

Two years on, the literature of #MeToo is coming of age | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

There has been a flowering of writing on the knotty problems of power and gender relations – but men must read it too, says Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett