Literary Americans Abroad

Young literary Americans abroad, from Ernest Hemingway at the bullfights to novelist Ben Lerner right now.

“You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein told Ernest Hemingway, the iconic young American abroad after World War I. Lost, maybe. But Hemingway’s American abroad was lost in bullfights and brawling. Spanish passion.

In his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” 1926, his Americans are flawed, but American competence and power are unquestioned. Flash forward most of a century. A new voice of the young American abroad is speaking. And it’s a much more modest voice.

This hour, On Point: From Hemingway to our time, and Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station.”
-Tom Ashbrook

Ben Lerner, poet and novelist, his new new book is Leaving the Atocha Station.

Gary Sernovitz, a novelist, his review of Leaving The Atocha Station is here.

Steve Paul, arts editor at the Kansas City Star and an expert on Ernest Hemingway.

The New York Times "In a book soaked in references to art and literature, there is no evident allusion to another short first novel centered on a young Midwesterner in Spain: “The Sun Also Rises,” published in 1926. Lerner’s novel could have the same epigraph as Ernest Hemingway’s — Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation” — and both books remind us that if you are far from home, alienated from life’s clean meaning, unfulfilled in love, and have a lot of time on your hands, you can at least make the days pass by being stoned, drunk or both."

The New Yorker "He may be aimless, but he has a poised intelligence, hospitable to paradox and dialectic, so that his “profound experience of the absence of profundity” becomes, for the reader, an engrossing inquiry into a man’s shallow depths; this short novel, in which nothing much happens, never feels like a longer one."

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http://www.scribd.com/doc/86945167/Atocha

Main theme The Sun Also Rises 1957
“And I was born” by The Lab