Two Novellas, Two Unreliable Narrators: Ben Lerner & Dorothy Baker (Book Club)

Kate and Laura are back and diving in to two book club reads, one recent release and one modern classic. Transcription by Ben Lerner was published earlier this year to much critical fanfare. It's a playful, intellectually ambitious exploration of writing, memory, technology and the slippery relationship between fiction and reality. When the narrator's phone fails to record his final interview with an eminent cultural figure, he reconstructs the conversation from memory. But does the truth of an encounter depend on an accurate transcript? And what happens when a novel begins to fold back on itself?

We discuss Lerner's auto-fictional project, his fascination with the act of writing, the glass flowers at Harvard's Natural History Museum, and whether Lerner's novels are genuinely profound or sometimes guilty of taking themselves a little too seriously.

Laura’s book club, meanwhile headed back to the mid-20th century with Dorothy Baker’s classic Cassandra at the Wedding, a brilliantly funny, unsettling and surprisingly contemporary novella about an intensely self-absorbed young woman determined to prevent her identical twin sister from getting married. With its claustrophobic family setting, unreliable narrator, dark comedy and complicated portrait of sisterly love, it's a novel that raises questions about identity, dependence, artistic ambition and the difficulty of allowing the people we love to become themselves – but what did Laura's book club make of it?

As ever in addition to the book club catch up we’re also swapping notes on recent reads and upcoming plans, including diving in to the Booker prize shortlist – the most enticing, we both agree, in years.

Notes and books mentioned

The Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models at Harvard

 A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying the Artist by Nathan Anthony West

Indiana by George Sand

Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens

The Romantics by Pankaj Mishra

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

The Great Dictator by Matthew Sweet

When the Going was Good by Graydon Carter

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

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Our next reads are A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch (October '26) and Helm by Sarah Hall (November '26).

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