Ben Lerner

Having passed a year marked by unlikely literary success, a potentially fatal medical diagnosis and a friend's request to help her conceive a child, a man explores his prospects in a New York that is overwhelmed by frequent superstorms and social unrest. By the award-winning author of Leaving the Atocha Station.

10:04: A Novel

Chris Dailey

Era hopping auto-fiction that blurs the lines between reality, fiction, and time in a thoroughly funny way. Lerner's day job as a poet comes through clearly with the deliberate word choice and attention to detail as we follow a pseudo Ben navigate new found success, a follow on novel, tutelage of a young student and becoming a father to his best friend's child through IUI. Hilarious general and sometime absurd, the stories deals with friendship, anxiety, oncoming dystopia, distortion of time, butterfly effects and self-absorption. Sharp wit triumphs with memorable scenes throughout despite a relatively banal plot.

heleen de boever

Tim Vos

A bit too much of a post-modern 'woe is me' roman-a-clef with the author as the protagonist and occasional eye-roll worthy politics, but all in all a well written and interesting novel with a very clever insight into the quotidian health-related insecurities we all have.

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 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.

10:04: A Novel

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