Fiction Book Club in Coconut Grove!

Books & Books in Coconut Grove is thrilled to present a Fiction Book Club hosted by our very own bookseller extraordinaire, Katherine Wakefield. This November 2026 pick is the winner of the Orwell Prize and named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New York Times: Transcription: A Novel by Ben Lerner. Riveting, unforgettable, and emotionally complex, Transcription unfolds in an exploration of father-son relationships, male friendship, and rivalry as its narrator must conduct the final published interview with a renowned artist and the father of his college friend, all with a broken smartphone unable to record a single anecdote or reminiscence.

This event will take place at Books & Books in Coconut Grove. RSVP is free, but please only register if you intend to join us as space is limited. This is an authorless event, and please come prepared to discuss the novel.

Books & Books can accommodate up to 40 guests in our upstairs event room. Please note that the event room is accessible only by stairs.

About The Book

Winner of the Orwell Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year (So Far) by The New York Times

From “the most talented writer of his generation” (Giles Harvey, The New York Times Magazine), a lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.

The narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety-year-old mentor and the father of his college friend Max. Thomas is a giant in the arts who seems to hail from the future and the past simultaneously and who reenchants the air when he speaks. But the narrator 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 the unforgettable story of the triangle formed by Thomas, Max, and the narrator, and an exploration of fathers and sons, male friendship and rivalry, and the challenges of parenting in a burning world. One of the first great novels about the early days of Covid, it is also a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich or impoverish our connection to one another, that store or obliterate memory. Full of startling insight, but summoning the intensity of a séance, Lerner’s writing shows us how the air is full of messages, full of ghosts. Ultimately, Transcription demonstrates what only a work of fiction can record.

About The Author

Ben Lerner is the author of several books of poetry and prose, as well as collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.