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78. Can Ben Lerner's Transcription Resurrect the Novel?
This podcast is a presentation of The Meow Library.
“Weaker writers transcribe; stronger ones, having broken their iPhones, creatively recast.”
- Giles Harvey, “The Ample Rewards of Ben Lerner’s Slender New Novel,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2026.
Ben Lerner has done something almost impossible in Transcription: he has made the novel dangerous again, restored both as argument and apparition, memory and fraud, broken machine and user error. Out of a failed recording, he has built a book so slim it looks, at first glance, like a dare, then unfolds as proof that the form can still be larger than…
The skinny
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