Ben Lerner & Joan of Arc at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Poet and now-novelist Ben Lerner meets The New York Times at the Met! Parul Sehgal talks to Lerner about his forthcoming novel, 10:04, to be published on Sept. 2 by Faber & Faber, in front of Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Joan of Arc, "which depicts Joan swooning as she hears the call to battle." “'What interests me about fiction,' he said, 'is, in part, its flickering edge between realism and where a tear in the fabric of a story lets in some other sort of light.'" More from this piece:

The book has little in the way of conventional plot: An American poet in Madrid (where Mr. Lerner was a Fulbright fellow), addled by “porn and privilege,” wanders around, halfheartedly pursuing women, telling increasingly elaborate lies, pickling in his self-loathing. The style was the real story: a palimpsest of poems, prose, G-chats, essays and photographs that invoke the slacker novel, the expat novel, the manic monologues of Thomas Bernhard — infused with a sly stoner charm.

“ ‘Atocha’ is “full of formal innovations,” Lorin Stein, the editor of The Paris Review and an early champion of the novel, wrote in an email, “the way it captures contemporary speech and thought and so on, but in a funny way, you take that stuff for granted. It’s not like someone using different colored inks or doodling in the margins — being ‘original.’ It’s more like you wonder how other novels got along without noticing those things.”

“10:04” picks up where the first book leaves off. The unnamed poet narrator has recently received “an alarming amount of critical acclaim” and is facing, to his bewilderment, a possible “strong six-figure” deal with a major publisher.

Read more about Ben Lerner and his thoughts on fiction, painting, and the publishing world at The New York Times.