Leaving the Atocha Station
Aug 2011 · Coffee House Press
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6 reviews
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About this ebook
From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time.
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. 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? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? 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.
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. 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? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? 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.
From a National Book Award finalist, this hilarious and profound first novel captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time.
Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowsh...
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Ratings and reviews
6 reviews
Matthew Lea
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June 28, 2026
Incredible, like being inside the head of the most intelligent, neurotic, anxious friend you've ever had
Joan Magee
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February 21, 2026
The life of a bipolar poet.
Roy Campbell-Moore
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March 15, 2026
Very lively and engrossing
About the author
Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner 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 Münster für Internationale Poesie. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College.
His debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, New York Magazine, and many others, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award.
His debut novel Leaving the Atocha Station was named one of the best books of 2011 by the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Boston Globe, New York Magazine, and many others, and is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the New York Public Library’s 2012 Young Lions Fiction Award.
Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner 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. ...
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