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.

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, 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

Praise for 10:04

“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

“This masterful, at times dizzying novel reevaluates not just what fiction can do but what is is . . . Hilarious and incisive, Lerner’s [10:04] would succeed without the layers of fiction (on reality on fiction). But with that narrative device, the book achieves brilliance, at once a study of how fiction functions and an expansive catalog of life.” —Tiffany Gilbert, Time Out New York [Five-star review]

“A brilliant novel . . . As promising a second effort as Atocha Station was a debut.” —Juliet Lapidos, The New Republic

“Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start.” —Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

“Ben Lerner is a brilliant novelist, and one unafraid to make of the novel something truly new. 10:04 is a work of endless wit, pleasure, relevance, and vitality.” —Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers

Praise for Leaving the Atocha Station

“A work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future.” —Geoff Dyer, The Observer

“Lerner’s writing [is] beautiful, funny, and revelatory.” —Deb Olin Unferth, Bookforum

“[A] subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel . . . There are wonderful sentences and jokes on almost every page.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“One of the funniest (and truest) novels . . . by a writer of his generation.” —Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books

“Flip, hip, smart, and very funny . . . Reading it was unlike any other novel-reading experience I’ve had for a long time.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross

“Remarkable . . . a bildungsroman and meditation and slacker tale fused by a precise, reflective and darkly comic voice.” —Gary Sernovitz, The New York Times Book Review

“The overall narrative is structured round [these] subtle, delicate moments: performances, as Adam would call them, of intense experience. They’re comic in that obviously, Adam is an appalling poseur. But they’re also beautiful and touching and precise.” —Jenny Turner, The Guardian

“Leaving the Atocha Station is a marvelous novel, not least because of the magical way that it reverses the postmodernist spell, transmuting a fraudulent figure into a fully dimensional and compelling character.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“An extraordinary novel about the intersections of art and reality in contemporary life.” —John Ashbery

“Utterly charming. Lerner’s self-hating, lying, overmedicated, brilliant fool of a hero is a memorable character, and his voice speaks with a music distinctly and hilariously all his own.” —Paul Auster

“Last night I started Ben Lerner’s novel Leaving the Atocha Station. By page three it was clear I was either staying up all night or putting the novel away until the weekend. I’m still angry with myself for having slept.” —Stacy Schiff

“A character-driven ‘page-turner’ and a concisely definitive study of the ‘actual’ versus the ‘virtual’ as applied to relationships, language, poetry, experience.” —Tao Lin, The Believer

“Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station is a slightly deranged, philosophically inclined monologue in the Continental tradition running from Büchner’s Lenz to Thomas Bernhard and Javier Marías. The adoption of this mode by a young American narrator—solipsistic, overmedicated, feckless yet ambitious—ends up feeling like the most natural thing in the world.” —Benjamin Kunkel, New Statesman’s Books of the Year 2011