10:04

Name: 10:04
Author: Ben Lerner

“Even if [Lerner] writes nothing else for the rest of his life, this is a book that belongs to the future.” — Giles Harvey, The New York Review of Books

About the Book

A stunning, urgent, and original novel from Ben Lerner (The Topeka School and Leaving the Atocha Station) about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire.

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Picador
Format: Paperback

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Recognition

Winner of The Paris Review's 2012 Terry Southern Prize
Finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award
Named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Guardian and others

From the publisher's description.

About the Author

Ben Lerner is the author of four books of poetry (The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, Mean Free Path, and The Lights), four novels (Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, The Topeka School, and Transcription) and a work of criticism (The Hatred of Poetry). His collaborations with artists include Blossom (with Thomas…

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