kvmop.blogg.se - Ben lerner 10 04 summary

His failure to make the Lerner who is experiencing things coincide with the Lerner who represents himself on the page and in the social world starts to feel, if not quite heroic, then certainly a matter that concerns all of us, as we obsess over our profile pictures and work out at the gym. Lerner writes with a poet's attention to language, and manages to make his preoccupation with identity more than solipsistic.

He's a walker in the city in conscious league with Walt Whitman, but also with writers up through Teju Cole… Small moments come steeped in vertiginous magic…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. That is, in his books, little happens, yet everything happens.

Lerner is among the most interesting young American novelists at present for several reasons, one being that he's akin to a young Brooklynite version of the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. 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.

Awards-Believer Book Award Terry Southern Prizeīen Lerner has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.

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.Ī 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. ( From the publisher.) 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.