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Reading for the Craft Book Club with Pedro & Swati - SOLD OUT
Past event
Featured Book
Leaving the Atocha Station
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 attitude towards art. It's not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his entire personality is just as fraudulent as his poetry.
About This Event
Writing is an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered”, says the Pulitzer-winning poet Carl Phillips. Join us as we delve into the mysteries of the art of storytelling. In this workshop-adjacent book club, we will discuss everything from plot beats to perspective choices to sentence-level sonics of major literary works and small press gems, in an attempt to understand how specific authorial choices shape the experience and impact of a story. You do not have to be a writer to join us — just someone with a deep love for literature and endless curiosity about how a story gets told.
This month we'll discuss Ben Lerner's hilarious and profound first novel, which captures the experience of the young American abroad while exploring the possibilities of art and authenticity in our time, Leaving the Atocha Station.
"Utterly charming. Lerners self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly and hilariously all his own.— Paul Auster
[A] noteworthy debut . . . . Lerner has fun with the interplay between the unreliable spoken word and subtleties in speech and body language, capturing the struggle of a young artist unsure of the meaning or value of his art. . . . Lerner succeeds in drawing out the problems inherent in art, expectation, and communication.— Publishers Weekly
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.
Contact Genay, at bookclubs@mcnallyjackson.com with any questions or to be added to the waitlist.
About the Venue
McNally Jackson · Downtown Brooklyn
This Downtown Brooklyn location is the second McNally Jackson in Brooklyn. Opening in 2020, it occupies two stores of City Point and features an extensive selection of fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, rare books, and stationery.
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