10:04: A Novel by Ben Lerner

10:04: A Novel by Ben Lerner

Named One of the Best Books of the Year By:
The New Yorker The New York Times Book Review The Wall Street Journal The Village Voice The Boston Globe NPR Vanity Fair The Guardian (London) The L Magazine The Times Literary Supplement (London) The Globe and Mail (Toronto) The Huffington Post Gawker Flavorwire San Francisco Chronicle The Kansas City Star The Jewish Daily Forward Tin House

Winner of The Paris Review's 2012 Terry Southern Prize

A Finalist for the 2014 Folio Prize and the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award

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.

In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called hilarious . cracklingly intelligent . and original in every sentence, Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.

Ben Lerner is the author of three collections of poetry, including Angle of Yaw, which was a National Book Award finalist. He graduated from Brown University and now teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He co-founded No: a journal of the arts and is a co-founder of No: a journal of the arts.