Ben Lerner’s second novel, 10:04, is narrated by a 33-year-old author who grew up in Topeka, Kansas and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. In the first ten pages we learn he’s recently received significant news from both his literary agent and his doctor. From his agent, he’s learned that due to a short story of his that the New Yorkerpublished, he could get a “strong-six figure” advance for his next book (“all I had to do was promise to turn it into a novel”); from his doctor, he’s learned that due to a “potentially aneurysmal dilation” of his aortic root, he might die at any moment (“an event I visualized, however incorrectly, as a whipping hose spraying blood into my blood; before collapse a far look comes into my eyes as though, etc.”). We also learn he’s considering his best friend Alex’s proposal of impregnating herself with his sperm, and that he’s collaborating on a little book about “the scientific confusion regarding the brontosaurus” with Roberto, an eight-year-old at a local, dual-language school. Both the aforementioned New Yorker story—”The Golden Vanity”—and the brontosaurus book—To The Future—appear in 10:04.

I interviewed Ben three years ago for The Believer about his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, and I kind of view that interview as part one to the part two of this interview. In the introduction to that interview, I wrote that with each new book by Ben I increasingly thought of his oeuvre as a single, already-completed work that was being released in parts. With the release of 10:04, I now also like to imagine Ben’s oeuvre as a collection of fractal, cross-reality resonances and interference patterns between and amongst life and fiction, poetry and prose, novels and essays and stories, sensation and imagination, past and future, images from fictional movies and photographs of concrete reality, factual histories within fictional narratives and fictional histories within global cultures, and so on, in further complex interactions—everything interconnected and having an influence on but not exactly determining everything else, and all of it curated by Ben to, in my experience, poignant and repeatedly startling effect. The following interview was done by Gmail chat and edited for clarity by email.

—Tao Lin

I. THE FLICKERING EDGE

THE BELIEVER: Last time I interviewed you—before the publication of Leaving the Atocha Station—you were in Marfa, Texas (a place featured in your new novel). Where are you now?

BEN LERNER: Lawrence, Kansas, visiting my parents. It is hotter right now in Lawrence than it was in Marfa, the high desert. A hundred-something. But it’s nice here; there are fireflies at night—innumerable ones by the river, not just the three or four I see in Prospect Heights. I feel like it’s always the same three or four flashing anemically in Brooklyn.

BLVR:...