Transcription – Ben Lerner

Published By: Granta Books
Pages: 144
Released On: 09/04/2026

A writer returns to his college town, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor. But after he 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 both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate our memories, and a moving exploration of the relationships that make us who we are.

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Granta for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

This is not the kind of book I would normally choose, and I haven’t read any of Ben’s previous work, and so I was going into this blind.

There are some looooooooooooong sentences which took some getting used to.

There’s not much in the way of plot, and very little character development to be honest, and yet somehow it isn’t dull. I think that’s partly to do with the short page length, anything too much longer and the lack of substance might have made it drag. And because of the short page count, it zoomed by and I read it in a couple of hours.

It is fascinating, a real insight into humanity and what we hear when we’re actually listening. It looks at what we’re missing because we live our lives through screens, we think we can’t survive without our phones, tablets, and computers.

It is very heavy on dialogue. I am a narrative person and am not overly keen on lots of dialogue, mainly because I struggle to write it myself, but this has got to be at least 75% dialogue, and that did get a bit sluggish – but that is a personal thing because I know some people love reading dialogue.

I believe Ben is a poet and I can definitely feel that in this book, there is an almost lyrical, poetical nature to the writing.

I was worried it would be too literary for me, a bit up itself, if that makes sense, and I’m not generally excited about literary novels, but this isn’t. Yes it is literary and it is aware of itself, but it doesn’t feel pompous or that it’s talking down to the reader.

It is split into three sections and they all are set around a different hotel, but they’re all linked to this main story, and I thought in the absence of smaller chapters, I feel it worked well to tell this particular story.

This has definitely piqued my interest, and whilst I’m not the biggest poetry fan, it has definitely got me interested to read some of his other work.