Transcription, Ben Lerner
Transcription, Ben Lerner
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Transcription
A Novel

Author: Ben Lerner

Narrator: Seth Numrich

Unabridged: 4 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/07/2026

Synopsis

From the “most talented writer of his generation” (The New York Times), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail “from the future and the past simultaneously” and who “reenchants the air” when he speaks. But 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 circumstance is the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of COVID, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but written with the intensity of a séance, Lerner shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About Ben Lerner

Ben Lerner is the author of several books of poetry and prose, as well as collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on March 12, 2026

Okay, now I see why everyone and their mother is obsessed with Lerner: This short novel about technology and memory presents itself as an experimental ghost story about father figures, and it has no business being so suspenseful, because hardly anything actually happens. "Transcription" is split in......more

Goodreads review by Kate on February 13, 2026

Transcription is divided into three parts. In Hotel Providence a writer returns to his college town to conduct a final interview with his ailing and aged mentor, Thomas. But having dropped his phone into the washbasin he finds himself in the dilemma of not being able to record the interview but not......more

Goodreads review by Max on December 29, 2025

Thought this would be unbearably arch, the sort of novel thrown together while Ben was on sabbatical, but I was surprisingly moved by it. More thoughtful than clever, which isn't always the case with Atocha Station and 10:04. Reminded me of Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, and reminded me of havi......more

Goodreads review by Anna on January 06, 2026

Transcription reminded me a little of Audition by Katie Kitamura, but it was more accessible and touching at the same time. This comparison stems from the subtle shifts in reality between the different sections, even though Lerner presents not only two like Kitamura, but three of them to us. The firs......more

Quotes

Advance Praise

“Ben Lerner’s novels contain some of the best art criticism I’ve encountered. His analysis is embodied but self-conscious, erudite but sincere. That’s why I’m looking forward to Transcription, about a non-interview with a ‘giant in the arts.’ I wouldn’t trust many writers to make a ‘plot’ like that worth my time, but I trust him.”
—Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic

“It’s every journalist’s worst nightmare, and yet, Lerner’s book still comes as a delightful exploration of mentorship, fatherhood, and a career in the arts, as well as a testament to our growing reliance on technology as a store of cultural memory.”
—CULTURED (Best Anticipated)

“Beautiful and resonant . . . Lerner’s lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist’s influence echoes through time. It’s a knockout.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more.”
—Max Porter, author of Shy

“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, author of Cursed Bread

"Some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered . . . [Transcription is] surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

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