Ben Lerner - 10:04 - A Novel

“Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement. As they said in the film Back to the Future, ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.’” —Ronald Reagan, State of the Union Address, February 4, 1986

Thank you, Ari. Thanks to my editor, Mitzi Angel, and to my agent, Anna Stein. I’m grateful for readings by: Michael Clune, Cyrus Console, Stephen Davis, Michael Helm, Sheila Heti, Aaron Kunin, Rachel Kushner, Stephen Lerner, Tao Lin, Eric McHenry, Anna Moschovakis, Maggie Nelson, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Ellen Rosenbush, Peter Sacks, Ed Skoog, and Lorin Stein. This book was written in conversation with Harriet Lerner; what’s best in it is for her.

I’m indebted to the Lannan Foundation for a residency in Marfa, Texas.

The story “The Golden Vanity” appeared in The New Yorker . Two excerpts of this book appeared in The Paris Review . The poem I wrote in Marfa, “The Dark Threw Patches Down Upon Me Also,” was made into a chapbook by the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College under the Epicenter imprint and was published separately in Lana Turner: A Journal of Poetry and Opinion . I am grateful to the artists at Columbia College and to the editors of these publications.

The “Institute for Totaled Art” is modeled on Elka Krajewska’s Salvage Art Institute; my description of the fictional version overlaps with my account of Krajewska’s actual work in “Damage Control,” an essay that appeared in Harper’s Magazine . The narrator’s collaboration with “Roberto” is based on a self-published book I cowrote with Elias Garcia, but “Roberto” is otherwise a work of fiction.

Time in this novel (when The Clock was viewable in New York, when a particular storm made landfall, etc.) does not always correspond to time in the world. I never had the chance to see The Clock reach midnight; I’ve borrowed details from Daniel Zalewski’s essay on Christian Marclay, “The Hours,” in The New Yorker.

I first encountered the text I use as an epigraph in Georgio Agamben’s The Coming Community , translated from the Italian by Michael Hardt. It is typically attributed to Walter Benjamin.

Ben Lerner was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. 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. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw , and Mean Free Path . Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Joan of Arc (detail), 1879. Oil on canvas, 100 × 110". The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift of Erwin Davis, 1889 (89.21.1). Photograph copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Image from the film Back to the Future provided courtesy of Photofest.

Photograph of Christa McAuliffe by Keith Meyers of The New York Times provided courtesy of Great Images in NASA.

Paul Klee (1879–1940), Angelus Novus , 1920. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 12½ × 9½". The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem, and John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, and Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York (B87.0994). Photograph by Elie Posner, copyright © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

Photograph of the Cydonia region of Mars taken by the Viking 1 orbiter provided courtesy of Great Images in NASA.

Photograph of Claude Roy on the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1947, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) provided courtesy of Magnum Photos.

Photograph of graffito in Chinati (Marfa, Texas) provided by Tim Johnson. Copyright © 2013 by Tim Johnson.

Image of brontosaurus skeleton provided by Wikimedia Commons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File: Brontosaurus_skeleton_1880s.jpg.

Brontosaurus © 1989 United States Postal Service. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.

Illustration of apatosaurus provided by Scott Hartman. Copyright © 2013 by Scott Hartman.

Photograph provided courtesy of the author.

Vija Celmins (b. 1938), Concentric Bearings B , 1984. Aquatint, drypoint, and mezzotint on paper. Image left: 4 15/ 16× 4 5/ 16", image right: 4 11/ 16× 3 11/ 16". Tate, London, acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through the d’Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008. Photograph copyright © 2014 by Tate, London.