10:04: A Novel

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.

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.

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.

Named One of the Best Books of the Year By:
The New YorkerThe New York Times Book ReviewThe Wall Street JournalThe Village VoiceThe Boston Globe NPR Vanity FairThe Guardian (London) The L MagazineThe Times Literary Supplement (London) The Globe and Mail (Toronto) The Huffington PostGawkerFlavorwireSan Francisco ChronicleThe Kansas City StarThe Jewish Daily ForwardTin House

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize. He has published threepoetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path.Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.