Staff Pick
Lerner delivers on the promise of his fiction debut, Leaving the Atocha Station, with this stunning exploration of the lines between fiction and nonfiction, audience and creator, and the mortality of the body and the immortality of art. I haven't read a book that better captures how it feels to be alive in the 21st century. Recommended By Tim B., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
“At 240 pages, his new novel does not announce itself as a magnum opus. But given Lerner's considerable humor, rigorous intelligence, and shred breed of conscience—his bighearted spirit and formal achievement—it is. A generous, provocative, ambitious Chinese box of a novel, 10:04 is a near-perfect piece of literature, affirmative of both life and art, written with the full force of Lerner's intellectual, aesthetic, and empathetic powers, which are as considerable as they are vitalizing.” Maggie Nelson, The Los Angeles Review of Books
Review
“Just how many singular reading experiences can one novelist serve up? ... 10:04 is a mind-blowing book; to use Lerner's own description, it's a book that's written ‘on the very edge of fiction' ... Lerner obviously loves playing with language, stretching sentences out, folding them in on themselves, and making readers laugh out loud with the unexpected turns his paragraphs take ... 10:04 is a strange and spectacular novel. Don't even worry about classifying it; just let Lerner's language sweep you off your feet.” Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross
Review
“Mr. Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists at present.... In 10:04 he's written a striking and important novel of New York City, partly because he's so cognizant of both past and present. He's a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman.... We come to relish seeing the world through this man's eyes.” Dwight Garner, The New York Times
About the Author
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 three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.