WINNER OF THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION
Named One of the Best Books of the Year and Novel Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026 by the New York Times
One of Literary Hub's Most Anticipated Books of 2026
Named One of The Books You Should Read in April by TIME
The New York Times' Book Review May 2026 Book Club Pick
A Vulture Best Book of the Year (So Far)
An Esquire Best Summer Book of the Year
"A slender, masterful novel. . . . As well as being a wry and intimate study of various kinds of love and admiration, it is also a novel about the place of recording and broadcasting technology in all our lives. As states and individuals struggle to respond to the altered, screen-dominated fabric of our world, Transcription articulates some of the central issues of our time with all the subtlety, indirection, and philosophical resonance which is the hallmark of fiction at its best."
—Orwell Prize Jury
"[A] remarkable fourth novel. . . . Lerner’s voice is one that interrupts itself, repeats history, and reorders the world."
—Hannah Gold, Harper’s Magazine
"Like all of Lerner’s books, [Transcription] teems with erudition and artistic ambition, exploring the instability of memory, the mediating powers of language, and the 'new-old' complexities of technological change."
—Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker
"In our world of deepfakes, ‘fresh air’ scents, and robo-voices emanating from pockets, there’s hope that understanding fiction—what we consider artifice, as well as its limits—might help lead us, collectively, back to our senses."
—Liza St. James, BOMB (Editor’s Choice)
"Lerner has been hailed by The New York Times as ‘the best writer of his generation,’ and his fourth novel lives up to the hyperbole. . . . Thomas once told the narrator: ‘We hear as if. We are together, erring.’ To riff on Rilke (‘For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror’), Lerner’s tale suggests that beauty might be only the beginning of error."
—Michael Autrey, Booklist (starred review)
"Ben Lerner’s novels contain some of the best art criticism I’ve encountered. His analysis is embodied but self-conscious, erudite but sincere. That’s why I’m looking forward to Transcription, about a non-interview with a ‘giant in the arts.’ I wouldn’t trust many writers to make a ‘plot’ like that worth my time, but I trust him."
—Lisa Yin Zhang, Hyperallergic
"It’s every journalist’s worst nightmare, and yet, Lerner’s book still comes as a delightful exploration of mentorship, fatherhood, and a career in the arts, as well as a testament to our growing reliance on technology as a store of cultural memory."
—CULTURED (Best Anticipated)
"Beautiful and resonant. . . . Lerner’s lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist’s influence echoes through time. It’s a knockout."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Transcription is another masterful intervention from a writer of unparalleled exactitude and intelligence. Lerner's linguistic precision, stylistic brilliance and philosophical range are not only thrilling things to encounter on the page, they are gentle surgical tools for a tender existential operation upon the reader. They crack open a profound reckoning with how we are living now, and the effect is genuinely startling. We call this fiction, but it is much, much more."
—Max Porter, author of Shy
"Transcription is both dizzyingly accomplished and disarmingly tender—an acutely elegant and forensic meditation on the disorientation of what it means to be alive now."
—Sophie Mackintosh, author of Cursed Bread
"Ben Lerner is a prodigy. . . . He has had, since adolescence, a very unusual ability to control sophisticated language and ideas. . . . [Transcription is] a concentration and intensification of his efforts to show how we can, and can’t, make sense of things. . . . In this clever, humble, beautiful book, Lerner leaves us where we actually are: trapped, separate, confused, but also, sometimes, leaning towards each other, helping as much as we can.
—Sean O'Beirne, The Monthly
"Some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered. . . . [Transcription is] surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Transcription is a beautiful meditation on cognitive capacity and the power of fiction. . . . Such a silvery, literary work offers something else: the kind of imaginative possibility that only a work of fiction set half in the dream world can summon. . . . One of the most compelling contemporary books I've read this year."
―Defector
"A short, smart novel about parenthood and influence; about how much of our lives we have ceded to the black rectangles in our pockets."
―The Observer
"Smartphones have become so integral to our lives. . . that how modern authors incorporate them into regular old paper books has become a kind of steeplechase. Right now Lerner, with his combination of erudition and lightness, and decathlete’s command of different, overlapping genres, is winning."
―The New York Times
"Lerner is a linguistic magician and here is another triumphant and beautiful sleight of hand."
―Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
"'Novels of ideas' don't need to wear them on their sleeve. Beneath its superficially simple tale of a man visiting his old mentor, this one has impressive depths: it touches on old age, loss and the double-edged sword of modern technology. Lerner . . . is already, at just 46, established as one of America's leading writers. This book proves why."
―Telegraph
"Strange and brilliant. . . . There is so much silence in this novel, so much air—a feeling of watching the action unfurl on a broad, bare stage and Lerner taking up a subject that he has circled but never really approached, until now."
―Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Magazine
"Puzzle-like. . . . A smart and subtle meditation on technology, memory, and the Covid pandemic, as well as a very human story about family and fatherhood. You'll read it, then want to read it again."
―GQ
"A layered exploration of memory, masculinity, and technology."
―Mail on Sunday
"A powerfully distilled novel about fathers and sons, mortality and inheritance, and the technologies shaping our lives."
―Bookseller
"A novel about touch, devices and familial inheritances that is itself intricate, uncanny, sometimes breathtakingly realistic. . . . Reveals itself as more, far more, than an anthropology of digital modernity."
―The Guardian
"Nothing in this exquisite, shape-shifting novel is quite what it seems—words least of all."
―Giles Harvey, The New Yorker
"Ben Lerner’s slender new novel, Transcription, is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions. . . . How does technology mediate our lives? How does it bring us together or pull us apart? Is there a difference between what’s real and what’s true? It also becomes a potent and poignant study of fatherhood and what it means."
―New York Times Book Review
"With Transcription, Lerner is rising to the challenge of novelizing what has become emblematic of millennial life. . . . Lerner writes novels of ideas, most particularly about language, but they remain grounded in and engaged with a recognizably real world."
―The LA Review of Books
"Intricate and unsettling, Transcription is a book of echoes and parallels; the connections it draws between individuals, and between life and art, are a signature of Lerner’s refined, allusive fiction."
―The New Republic
". . . Some of Lerner’s most brilliant and daring writing to date, a mad, oracular burst of speech — about technology, parenthood, and dreaming—that flits effortlessly between prose and poetry."
―Vulture
"Lerner’s novel comes as close as we can yet imagine to honoring their delicate way of registering a change that is everywhere around us—and that is making nonsense of the difference between inside us and outside us."
―The Atlantic
"Remarkable. . . . Transcription is Lerner's best book, moving and mysterious and strange."
—Commonweal
