al 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 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