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.
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bennett_the_ceo
(Grade: B) Lerner's prose is exceedingly gorgeous. (Even his semicolons are sexy.) Every sentence is meticulously structured, with layers of insight and humor woven on top of each other. But like too much of modern literary fiction, this is a writer writing about writers and writing, specifically around hip parts of New York City. Lerner has brilliant things to say about society and the human experience; it's a shame he had to resort to such an autobiographical (and at-times self-congratulating) format.
(Grade: B) Lerner's prose is exceedingly gorgeous. (Even his semicolons are sexy.) Every sentence is meticulously structured, with layers of insight and humor woven on top of each other. But like too much of modern literary fiction, this is a writer writing about writers and writing, specifically around hip parts of New York City. Lerner has brilliant things to say about society and the human experience; it's a shame he had to resort to such an autobiographical (and at-times self-congratulating) format.(Rated on Jul 29, 2015)
1
Susieq2 (Grade: D) This book was very wordy and hard to stay interested in.
(Rated on Feb 29, 2016)