Ben Lerner is no stranger to critical acclaim. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the Believer Book Award. His second poetry collection, Angie of Yaw, was nominated for the National Book Award. This year, he won the Terry Southern Fiction Prize from the Paris Review. But what you may not know about Ben Lerner is that he also has a great sense of humor.

Recently, Lerner joined us for Live at NYPL. He spoke with moderator Paul Holdengräber about modernism, lived experience, and Back to the Future. When Holdengräber expressed his befuddlement over the classic eighties film, Lerner quipped:

"You watched this weird Oedipal drama where he’s sent into the past and his mom comes on to him and he has to avoid her sexual advances in order to get born, and it’s a movie that contains an abiding white fantasy where Michael J. Fox basically teaches black people how to play rock ‘n’ roll so that retrospectively white people have invented African American cultural forms… I mean it’s all there.”

The discussion wasn’t all McFly and DeLorean sports cars, however. Lerner also discussed the way in which he hoped to challenge some ideas underlying modernism in his most recent novel 10:04:

“For me as a poet growing up with a modernist poetics, there was always this idea that contemporary reception was always just horribly compromised by the market and one definition for Colum McCabe was that modernism displaces its readers into the future. You’re supposed to produce these difficult works that survive recuperation by the market but then one day in this imagined future there’s gonna be somebody like smart enough and pure enough to read your book. And so a lot of modernist literature is very contemptuous, not all of it, but a lot of it is very contemptuous of the reader in the present, and I wanted to move away from it, to kind of purge myself of those tendencies.”

And then of course there’s the question on many readers’s minds: is the narrator-protagonist of 10:04 a stand-in for Lerner himself? The author says the matter is simply yes and no:

“For me, there’s a power in tracking the way that fictions are made, the way that lived experience becomes material for fiction. And for me that requires a first person who’s me and not me so that I can kind of make the process of the way lived experience gets transposed into fiction a part of the work.”

You can watch the full Ben Lerner talk below, and find his books in the catalog.