10:04

<b>"Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new. <i>10:04</i> is a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and vitality." --Rachel Kushner, author of <i>The Flamethrowers</i><br></b><br>     <i>Leaving the Atocha Station</i> was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels...of his generation" (Lorin Stein, <i>New York Review of Books</i>), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, <i>The Observer</i>). Now Lerner's second novel departs from <i>Atocha</i>'s exquisite ironies in order to explore new territories of thought and feeling.<br>     In the last year, the narrator of <i>10:04</i> has enjoyed unexpected literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child, despite his dating a rising star in the visual arts. In a New York of increasingly frequent super storms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water.<br>     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, when the difficulty of imagining a future has changed our relation to both our present and our past. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, <i>10:04</i> is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.