This is an extract from Transcription by Ben Lerner, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2026. Find out more about the book here, and get your copy here.
I was falling asleep on the train. I was going to interview Thomas, who had just turned ninety. My seat was facing opposite the direction of travel, making it difficult to read his latest book, which I was holding in my hand. It upsets my stomach if I try to read while I’m looking the wrong way—or, as my ten-year-old, Eva, put it on a train to Lublin last summer, if I am “facing the past.”
I sat staring out the window through the faint reflection of my masked face in the glass. I felt that I needed only to think of a good opening question for the interview and then the conversation would flow. My main concern was that I would somehow fail to record us on my phone, or that I’d manage to delete the voice memos when I tried to send them to the magazine.
I looked away from the window to text Mia: “That was a hard morning.”
“We got her there,” she responded immediately, probably from her computer.
“Barely.”
“But still. Eckert would say to think of it as ‘a win.’”
“Yeah. Lmk right away though if you get a call from the school. They always call you.”
“Ofc but I doubt they will. I really think she is OK. And anyway the school day’s almost done.”
I made the thumbs-up. The man in the old-fashioned hat came by to check the tickets. I enlarged the little QR code and he scanned it. Then I put my earbuds in and began to listen to a talk, recorded in Paris in 1973, that Thomas gave about translation. I took a photo of the win-try, postindustrial landscape through my masked reflection as the train picked up speed, and then I checked and deleted the photo and shut my eyes and faced the past. My mentor paused, fifty-one years ago, and poured water into a glass. Someone in the audience coughed twice.
I was in Paris. (I don’t know how else the recording influenced the dream.) I was getting Eva from what must have been her school. I stood outside a tall and ornate wrought-iron fence, waiting for the gates to open. There were other parents and caregivers around, whispering to each other or into their phones. I don’t speak French, but it was clear that people were anxious. The wind was picking up. I heard sirens in the distance. I looked at my phone, but there were no alerts.
The gates swung open and I tried to pass through them, eager to reach my daughter, but a woman—dark, beautiful, familiar, her head covered with a scarf—stopped me, her hand on my chest, and said, “Impossible.” Then I realized that what I’d thought were only scattered groups of parents or caregivers was in fact a line that I’d unintentionally cut. I begged pardon, a thousand pardons, and stepped aside; well-dressed people flowed past me mumbling about my rudeness. I tried to find the back of the line and was shocked to see how far down the street it extended.
As I walked against the direction of the line, night fell. I could see night falling from the trees. Now the wind was pelting me with leaves or seedpods or garbage. There was some kind of grit—sand, maybe—in my teeth and I kept spitting; I was aware that the other parents were right-fully disgusted by me. I had no sense of how much time had elapsed, how long I’d been walking toward the end of the endless line. Then, from a thousand pockets, including mine, came a high-pitched screeching sound. I began to run. In my desperation to reach my daughter I was sprinting away from her.
* * *
It was a thirteen-minute walk from the Amtrak station to Hotel Providence. I’d selected the hotel online more or less at random; it was four stars, around two hundred dollars a night; the magazine was paying. It was thirty-nine degrees, partly cloudy. I’d turned forty-five a couple of months be-fore Thomas turned ninety. I still had my earbuds in and I was listening to walking directions, even though I knew the way. It wasn’t yet four p.m. but dusk felt imminent, the sun low in the sky.
Hotel Providence was on Mathewson Street. It was across from a church I knew, where I had once seen a play (the fourth floor of the church was an experimental “theater space”), and beside some sort of clinic. In front of the clinic a small group of people was smoking, arguing, maybe bartering. Two people—I thought I could make out two dis-tinct bodies—were sleeping on the sidewalk in a complex of blankets and cardboard boxes. Across the street, near the front of the church, a drunk woman without a coat was yelling at a man who kept firmly but gently pushing her away as she tried to slap him. The facade of the hotel had been recently refinished, its polish incongruous with the old church and the clinic and the bare life on the street.
The interior of the hotel was vast. I could hear what sounded like live piano music, but saw no piano. I briefly considered masking. After I checked in, I was instructed to walk through the lounge, past various mismatched couches and chairs and stone vases of fake flowers, then to turn left and walk past the signs for the fitness center until I found the elevator, which took me to my room on the fourth floor. The room, like everything else, was oversized: a king bed, a couch, an expansive writing desk. There were two complimentary plastic bottles of water from two different brands. I looked through my bag for the phone charger and plugged it in and turned on the TV and opened the blinds and half listened to the news as I sat on the bed and stared out the window, which offered a view of the church. I was trying to think of a first question, maybe something about translation, but I was distracted by the idea that a version of myself was still watching the play, which had been put on by friends.
I became aware that the news had shifted from Gaza to Paris: bedbugs in Paris, a recent scourge, maybe exaggerated, but negatively impacting tourism nevertheless. I got off the bed and pulled back the comforter and checked the white sheets for russet traces of dried blood, then lifted the mattress and inspected its bottom edge. They commonly travel in clothes or luggage, but they can also spread through books and dreams.
Eva would be home from afterschool, but before I called her, I needed to call Thomas and tell him that I’d arrived, would be over in an hour. I was strangely hesitant about calling; we never spoke on the phone. We emailed and arranged my very infrequent visits over email. Why was I more nervous about briefly encountering his disembodied voice than spending hours with his embodied one? “You should write that down,” Eva said in my head. My daughter often said that I should write my questions down.
I muted the TV and called Thomas while hunched awkwardly over the desk so the phone could stay plugged in. I told him that I was here and would come over soon, if that was OK. Of course, I’ve been expecting you, let yourself in; he would have something for us to eat and drink. Then I got in the shower and tried to formulate a question, and when I emerged it was night, the facade of the church yellowed by streetlight. I put on the same clothes in which I’d traveled. I drank down one of the bottles of water, which in my mind was the water Thomas had sipped from fifty years ago in Paris. I unplugged my phone and FaceTimed Mia so I could say hello to Eva.
Eva herself answered. Mia’s phone number was con-nected to the iPad Eva used for screen time. “Hi, Dada,” she said, sounding calm.
“Hi, my love, what are you doing,” I said, relieved.
“Playing Fruit Ninja,” she said.
“That’s the one where you just cut up the fruit?”
“Yup. Mom’s making dinner and she said I could play till she’s done.”
“Where is Luna?” Luna was the rescue we’d adopted early in the pandemic.
Eva turned the camera of the iPad to show me the white dog sleeping on the blue leather couch. “Hi, Luna girl, what are you doing,” I said.
“She doesn’t hear voices or recognize things on screens,” Eva said.
“Why do you think that is?” I asked. And when she didn’t say anything: “How was school?”
“Fine,” she said.
I made myself count to ten to see if she’d elaborate, then: “For me the mornings are often the hardest part of the day,” I said. “For me the day often seems impossible in the morning and then OK once it gets going.”
“Yeah,” she said, maybe listening.
“I’m really anxious about this interview I’m about to do,” I exaggerated, wanting to normalize anxiety.
“You’ll do great,” she quoted.
“Want to see my weird hotel room?”
“I have to beat this level.”
“OK. I’ll FaceTime you later to say good night.”
“OK, promise?”
“Yes.”
“OK, love you, bye,” end-call sound effect.
I brushed my teeth. The sink didn’t drain properly. I had streaked my cheek with toothpaste so I washed my face. Then I reached for my phone, which I’d set in the small steel tray attached to the mirror. I somehow knocked the phone into the water.
(c) Ben Lerner
Explore the full list of 2026 Orwell Prize finalists, and read further extracts from the books, here.