Transcription by Ben Lerner

I listened to Ben Lerner’s new novel in one go today in my studio and can’t recommend it enough. A journalist takes the train from New York to Providence to interview his aging and very famous former-professor and accidentally drops his iPhone in a hotel sink beforehand, then pretends to record the interview on the broken phone to save face. Fatherhood, iPhone addiction, WWII history, the vagaries of memory and haunting of family history, forgiveness, and those ASMR unboxing videos on YouTube. Lerner wrote my favorite new book of the year.