10:04

10:04

  • by Ben Lerner
  • Narrated by Eric Michael Summerer
  • 7 hrs and 26 mins
  • Unabridged Audiobook
3.8 (124
Ratings.
)

Publisher's Summary

In the last year, the narrator of 10:04 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. Exploring sex, friendship, medicine, memory, art, and politics, 10:04 is both a riveting work of fiction and a brilliant examination of the role fiction plays in our lives.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful

Too Much of Himself

This well-received quasi-novel focuses on a guy a lot like Ben Lerner, I guess. Other readers found it brilliant, but I found it too self-satisfied and too self-indulgent. There are lots of scenes around New York that show off his cleverness and sensitivity, at dinner parties and natural history museums and lunch with his agent and fertility clinics. But only one character struck me as real: Mr. Lerner himself. The others were one-dimensional mirrors for the narrator, not much more. (One exception: his colleague at the Park Slope Food Coop, who tells the narrator a surprising and suspenseful story about her family history, interrupted by Ben's having to deliver the dried mango he's been packing to the sales floor.)

I have one suspicion, that a story late in the novel about an intern at a literary retreat in Marfa whom the narrator comforts through a bad drug trip...was this based upon an adventure in which Mr. Lerner was the intern and not the comforting older figure? But a bad trip, was that too cliched and uncool for our narrator? Who knows. It's a novel.

The book was well-read by Eric Michael Summerer.
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- David

Kill me. Just kill me

Have you ever talked to one of those pretensions know-it-all's who is SO much smarter/better than you and can't help but tell you? yea, that's this guy. I feel like the author set out to write the most pretensions book possible and did it. There are sentences that lasted half a page (i started to read the physical book for a book club but couldn't stomach it). There were times i was so angry at this story i wanted to throw something, namely the book. And seriously, how many times does one man need to mention quinoa in a book?
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- Andrew

Book Details

  • Release Date: 10-28-2014
  • Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC
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