Transcription by Ben Lerner audiobook review – a mediation on memory for the smartphone era

Ben Lerner’s *Transcription* follows an unnamed narrator travelling to interview his 90-year-old former mentor, the German writer and film-maker Thomas. When the narrator’s iPhone is ruined by water, he panics about losing the ability to record the interview and speak to his young daughter, prompting a meditation on memory, storytelling and dependence on technology.

As he tries to remember Thomas’s words without a working phone, the narrator becomes more attentive to the world around him, though he later feels his craving for the device return. The audiobook is read by actor Seth Numrich, whose performance conveys the narrator’s neurotic tendencies and handles the novella’s layered prose and shifts between truth and fiction. The review also recommends *Ghost Stories* by Siri Hustvedt, about grief and her husband Paul Auster, and *Out Now* by Scott Bryan, on queer identity and television.