Product DescriptionA NEW YORK TIMES, TIME, GQ, Vulture, and WASHINGTON POST TOP 10 BOOK of the YEARONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF THE YEARFinalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle AwardShortlisted for the Rathbones Folio PrizeWinner of the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book AwardFrom the award-winning author of 10:04 and Leaving the Atocha Station, a tender and expansive family drama set in the American Midwest at the turn of the century, hailed by Maggie Nelson as Ben Lerner's "most discerning, ambitious, innovative, and timely novel to date."Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak. Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart--who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father's patient--into the social scene, to disastrous effect.Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane's reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan's marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.Review“I’m confident in calling [The Topeka School] a high-water mark in recent American fiction. In an age whose surplus-linguistic, economic-often seems to bespeak an underlying emptiness, is it possible for ‘a profound experience of art’ still to mean something? The answer, as The Topeka School enacts it, is Hell yes.”―Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times Book Review“An extraordinarily brilliant novel that’s also accessible to anyone yearning for illumination in our disputatious era. . . Among the myriad miracles of The Topeka School is that it accomplishes so much, captures so much and questions so much about America in fewer than 300 pages.” ―Ron Charles, The Washington Post"Because Lerner draws so freely from his own life, he is often grouped together with other writers of autofiction, like Karl Ove Knausgaard and Sheila Heti, which does his work a slight disservice. It ignores his real lineage, the great literature of passivity, failure and refusal: Melville’s Bartleby, the novels of Robert Walser and László Krasznahorkai."―Parul Seghal, The New York Times“The Topeka School is thoroughly grounded in its time. . . Lerner makes a case for the ways in which sexism, racism, and homophobia were brewing, waiting for the explosive catalyst of the internet.” -Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair“Lerner seems interested in reiterating via the details of his own biography the now-evident political reality that these alienated men are powerful and dangerous precisely when they feel they are not. . . In America, Lerner reminds us, you can sound like an idiot all you want, but if you master the spread, you rule.” -Jordan Kisner, Atlantic“[An] essayistic and engrossing novel . . . Few writers are so deeply engaged as Lerner in how our interior selves are shaped by memory and consequence . . . Increasingly powerful and heartbreaking as the story moves on. Autofiction at its smartest and most effective: self-interested, self-interrogating, but never self-involved.”―Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)“The Topeka School is [Lerner’s] 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 su

We ship at a flat rate of $9.99 per order. Orders $35 and up ship free of charge.