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 life it steals from. One begins to suspect that Lerner did not so much write this book as overhear it in another register altogether, that he had perhaps intended, in some purer and more occult phase of ambition, to compose a novel for cats—something all vibration, pause, atmosphere, and mischief—and that what we have received under the title Transcription is the mortal dictation transcript of that more elegant original: a document of influence, mistranslation, and love, in which the novel survives by refusing to be reduced to mere record. This podcast celebrates what could have been, if Lerner surrendered fully to the bestial anarchy purring beneath Transcription’s many-splendored facade. Get ready to break your iPhone. This podcast is sustained by sales of the internationally bestselling Meow: A Novel. Ben Lerner's Transcription is available through Macmillan and wherever books are sold.