This print edition is also available in downloadable eBook and PDF formats. This is a novel of 95,000 words. Clayton has a story to tell. It's so good he loses track of what's real and what he is creating. As the author gets deeper into his novel, dealing with a deadly woman in a small town that's crazy for good murder gossip, somewhere along the way he crosses over. It's too late when Clayton finally realizes he's Leaving Reality. The good folks he meets along the way may not be enough to keep either of them, the author or his protagonist, alive. Some content is intended for mature adults.

This is the unusual story of a young lad who grows up in Alaska with his life dominated by dreams of playing hockey in the National Hockey League. His family and friends and home town all lend helping hands, but he has to battle on all levels past a personal adversary who tries to block him with every step. Only in the final chapter can we measure the success or failure of our young hero's life.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

An international journal of general philosophy.