The Topeka School

A great novel, one summoned by the desperate times in which it was written. Lerner has [...] created a work of extraordinary intelligence and subtlety, of lasting importance * Observer * The Topeka School, is an education in the sympathetic imagination, a deep and bracing intellectual challenge, a powerful political statement...Lerner plays winningly in the fertile ground between fiction and memoir...Wider-reaching, subtler and kinder than his earlier works, this is a novel to cherish... hilarious * Observer * One of the best writers working today... athletic and funny and thrillingly intelligent...a tender, extended portrait of two good parents, a rarity in literature... the nonlinear structure produces narrative lacunae that powerfully enhance our understanding of character and event. The different voices are done simply and subtly...everything feels breezy and effortless despite Lerner's unbridled intellect. What can't he do?... [Lerner is] fearsomely articulate... I expect to be recommending [this} for the rest of my life * Sunday Times * The Topeka School is [Lerner's] most successful effort at navigating between communal experience...and individual feeling without denaturing either... dazzling * Guardian * Ambitious... In this frequently virtuosic novel, we glimpse the seam between the human-constructed world and the abyss beyond * Irish Times * The perniciousness of masculinist ideology is...at the centre of Ben Lerner's forthcoming third novel, The Topeka School * Guardian * The Topeka School is a novel of exhilarating intellectual inquiry, penetrating social insight an deep psychological sensitivity... To the extent that we can speak of a future at present, I think the future of the novel is here -- Sally Rooney Ben Lerner has redefined what it means for a writer to inhabit an American present by showing how a family reckons with its past. Here the personal and political are masterfully interwoven. The Topeka School is brave, furious, and finally a work of love -- Ocean Vuong Ben Lerner is arguably the hottest novelist writing in America today, in complete control of his ideas and his prose, and ambitious with both * Telegraph * The latest work from this speccy, hipster-beloved American follows a high-school debater who introduces a weird loner into the social scene with disastrous consequences * Times * The Topeka School is what happens when one of the most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely writers of our day writes his most discerning, ambitious, innovative and timely novel to date. It's a complete pleasure to read Lerner experimenting with other minds and times, to watch his already profound talent blooming into new subjects, landscapes, and capacities. This book is a prehistory of a deeply disturbing national moment, but it's written with the kind of intelligence, insight, and searching that makes one feel well-accompanied and, in the final hour, deeply inspired -- Maggie Nelson In Ben Lerner's riveting third novel, Midwestern America in the late nineties becomes a powerful allegory of our troubled present. The Topeka School deftly explores how language not only reflects but is at the very center of our country's most insidious crises. In prose both richly textured and many-voiced, we track the inner lives of one white family's interconnected strengths and silences. What's revealed is part tableau of our collective lust for belonging, part diagnosis of our ongoing national violence. This is Lerner's most essential and provocative creation yet -- Claudia Rankine, author of * Citizen: An American Lyric * Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new...He is one of my favourite living writers -- Rachel Kushner Ben Lerner is a masterful writer who destabilizes the very notion of what a novel can achieve by making it new at every turn. The Topeka School is not only a fiction for our times, but for the ages: insightful, humane, politically astute, and true -- Hilton Als, author * White Girls * The Topeka School weaves a masterful narrative...It's rare to find a book that is simultaneously searing in its social critique and so lush in its prose that it verges on poetry * Paris Review * Ambitious and original... like no other American family saga I've ever read' * Bookseller * The novel lurches towards the final launching of the cue ball like a tornado swerving over open country * I Paper * This riveting novel takes a sharp look at toxic masculinity and its effect on young men * Good Housekeeping * A funny, penetrating book about language, politics and masculinity...Lerner never shies away from emotional or intellectual complications. If anything, he feeds on them * Evening Standard * A potent, painful picking-apart of trauma...Lerner brilliantly pleats and plays with time... one of the most essential [novels] published this year * Daily Mail * [Lerner] combines the autofictional...and the metafictional with exceptional dexterity * Financial Times * [Lerner] is a real novelist... a fine, exacting novel * Telegraph * Ben Lerner's static crackle of intelligence is the first thing you notice about him and his work * Sunday Times * Elegant, readable and delightfully clever * The Times * Lerner's erudite third novel switches perspectives with effortless agility...zeitgeisty and involving * Mail on Sunday * A decade-hopping family saga... Lerner's vigorously witty coming-of-age narrative serves as an insider critique of masculinity and privilege * Metro * The best opening ten pages I've read all year, a seductive combination of foretold violence and anecdotal misadventure... This is a book that absolutely knows about the follies of intelligence...it has many scenes in it which reveal that -- Tom Sutcliffe * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review * A thrilling, thrilling book... I found it very powerful -- Maria Delgado * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review * A tremendously impressive novel -- Kevin Jackson * BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review * Pleasingly intricate... this is a serious book for serious times * Scotland on Sunday * Lerner inhabits [his characters] voices so subtly it makes most other first person narratives look like ham acting... [he] knows exactly when to hold back, using silence to complicate the texture and expand the scope of a big novel that fits perfectly into just 304 pages. Judicious metafictional touches not only comment on the act of writing, they also heighten the novel's verisimilitude. That's a hard trick to pull off, but in Lerner's hands, a magical simultaneity occurs: we get the apples, the fermentation process, and the sparkling cider all at once -- Best Books of the Year (chosen by Claire Lowdon) * TLS * Rising star Ben Lerner came into his own with the stunningly multilayered The Topeka School, exploring voice, power and masculinity in the 90s and now -- Best fiction of 2019 * Guardian * Exceptional * Art Review * One of the most talked about novels of the Autumn * Monocle * When early copies of The Topeka School arrived in London and New York, I heard stories of people cancelling dinner dates in order to read * LRB * Autofiction? Believe you me, it's the hippest thing on the block right now * Private Eye * Brilliant... Gripping... Lerner succeeds...in painting ordinary scenes of suburban life with vibrant colours on a lavish canvas, the details emerging with a mixture of humour and horror ... Lerner knows what he is doing in one of the best and most satisfyingly provocative large-scale social novels I have read for some time * Prospect * [The Topeka School] brilliantly illuminates the present * Totally Dublin * As ever, Lerner is a lyrical virtuoso who delivers a book dense with thoughts and ideas * Dublin Sunday Business Post * By one of America's coolest young authors... consistently brilliant -- Books of the Year * Daily Mail * Taking aim at toxic masculinity, Ben Lerner's latest novel explores, in part, how American culture has twisted young men and created our contemporary political moment -- Books of the Year * GQ * [The Topeka School] reminded me of David Foster Wallace at his best - writing that demands something of the head and the heart -- Alex Preston * Observer *