Hello, you're listening to Culture Call, a transatlantic conversation from the Financial Times.

I'm Griselda-Marie Brown in London.

And I'm Lila Raptopoulos in New York.

Coming up on today's episode.

It's very easy to just kind of disavow the nastiness of mainstream political rhetoric.

The more complicated thing, which I think is particularly incumbent upon white men,

a privilege is to think about how those voices are actually inside us.

Today's guest is novelist and poet Ben Lerner, who just came out with an extremely unique book to very wide acclaim called The Topeka School.

Gris, why don't you tell everybody why we were excited to have been on the show?

Yes, Ben Lerner is one of the best, most highly regarded living American writers. When he

publishes a new book, it's a really big deal. It feels like an event. And there are people all over

Instagram wearing these sweatshirts that have the name of his new book on it, the Topeka School,

which is quite funny. It feels like a kind of the social media stuff going on.

Can I just say that there's nobody on my Instagram wearing the Jolnik school?

It's a small corner of Instagram, I should probably say. A dusty bookish corner.

It's a very cool corner of Instagram. So I would say his following is a kind of cult literary following rather than a mainstream one.

Although it does feel like that might be about to change.

Like we're on the cusp of him becoming well known in a different kind of way.

You know, if you haven't read his books, this feels like a time where, you know, it's good for him to be on your radar.

It's only his third novel, but it feels like a slightly different one. Basically, he's a writer who's doing

new things with the novel and sort of pushing at what it can be. And I think that's really

exciting to read. People talk a lot about how it's sort of a book for the Trump era.

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