A stunning, urgent, and original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire, from "a courageous, immensely intelligent artist" (Jeffrey Eugenides)
"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.""—Maureen Corrigan, NPR

Within the span of a single 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. Now, 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" (The Guardian), Ben 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.

Now a Los Angeles Times Bestseller, a New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and a Finalist for the Folio Prize Named a Best Book of the Year by more than twenty publications and bookstores, including Vanity Fair, The New Yorker (selected by Elif Batuman), The New York Times (selected by Dwight Garner), The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal (selected by Caleb Crain), The Atlantic, and NPR