Ben Marcus is the author of Notable American Women (2002), The Age of Wire and String (1995), The Flame Alphabet (2012), Leaving the Sea (2014), and Notes from the Fog (2018). His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. Marcus’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Award in Fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
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The Age of Wire and StringStoriesFrom"Sleep (Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife)"
Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household’s walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
The Age of Wire and String:Stories -
The Age of Wire and StringStoriesFrom"Food (Hidden Food, from Above)"
The chief legal problem connected with hidden food is that of title. A scavenger cannot acquire title to chicken that he has discovered abruptly, and therefore he cannot transfer title even by barter to an innocent dining man who has requested a stew. Hence the rightful owner of the chicken may take it without compensation from anyone who has not properly tracked it according to the rules set forth in the Topographical Legend and Location of Food Nooks. The innocent dining man, however, may challenge the scavenger for breach of his implied warranty of good title as it applies to edible objects, in this case the promised delivery of a chicken bisque with definite ownership.
The Age of Wire and String:Stories -
The Age of Wire and StringStoriesFrom"The House (Works from the War Between Houses and Wind: Air Dies Elsewhere)"
When air kills itself in remote regions, the debris settles here on the grass, sharpening the points. Men of the house may not walk on these areas, nor may they ever observe the grass without pain in the chest and belly. They exist as figures which are doubled over, in static repose against the house territory. When children sleep on these points of lawn, the funeral of air passes just above their heads in a crosswind with the body. Funerals generally are staged in pollinated wind frames, so that the air can shoot to the east off of the children’s breath, dying elsewhere along the way, allowing fresh, living air to swoop in on the blast-back to attack the house.
The Age of Wire and String:Stories
“The best stories in Leaving the Sea . . . seem powered by the electrostatic charge that results whenever the texture of the familiar is abraded by some alien, highly resistant material . . . As we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if we’re moving gradually through a dark chronology of America’s imminent social and political unraveling . . . Marcus is nothing less than fully engaged in an artistic enterprise that the surrealists would have authorized: injecting into our recognizable world just enough weirdness to make readers second-guess their senses.” —The Washington Post
“Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent . . . Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic . . . [The Flame Alphabet] reads like a dream.” —J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book Review
“Echoes of Ballard’s insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka’s terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes—I mean our world—out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic.” —Michael Chabon
“I don’t use the word lightly, in fact, I don’t use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified—he makes the word new and thus the world.” —George Saunders
Selected Works
