J.S. Marcus
J.S. Marcus was born in Milwaukee in 1962. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin Law School. Mr. Marcus is the author of two works of fiction, The Art of Cartography (1991), a collection of stories set mostly in New York and London, and a novel, The Captain's Fire (1996), set in Berlin in the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Mr. Marcus's fiction has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker and Harper's, and his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, Conde Nast Traveler, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, and the New York Review of Books. Mr. Marcus is a former senior fellow at the Remarque Institute of European Studies at NYU and longtime Berlin resident.
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The Art of CartographyStoriesFrom"The Art of Cartography"
At a party, I met a mercenary. He had fought Communists in Afghanistan before fighting Communists in Nicaragua. He described a process invented by the Russians to strip the skin off Afghan rebels. “It was psychological warfare disguised as chemical warfare,” he said. “The Moslem believes in the ‘pure warrior,’ sanctity of the body, that sort of thing. When he saw row after row of bodies with the skin peeling off, he went mad.” The mercenary drank his champagne. “A Moslem believes the skinless soul is doomed. Gone to hell.”
The Art of Cartography:Stories -
The Art of CartographyStoriesFrom"Home"
My first apartment in New York had a courtyard. The friend who helped me move stuck his head out the window, into the courtyard. “The only noise you’ll hear,” he said, “is white noise. Air-conditioners. Classical music.” Later that night, we both looked out the window at the two women screaming in the apartment across the courtyard. “Your mother was a whore,” one said to the other, which was all we could make out until the silence, and then the thud as the woman who had just been hit landed on the floor.
The Art of Cartography:Stories -
The Art of CartographyStoriesFrom"Leaving"
David, a man I lived with and tried to abandon, decided that competence was a kind of genius. He gave up—and denounced—his job as a music critic in New York to take a teaching post in Los Angeles. “There is no difference between loving music and loving music well,” he said; he imagined rooms full of eager average students. We were on the phone long distance when he told me. I had left him in New York (the abandonment) to attend law school in the Middle West. I had left our life together, and now he was leaving it too. I imagined two other people, another David, another Sheila, in our apartment, oblivious and bored respectively. “Maybe I’ll come out for a visit,” I told him.
The Art of Cartography:Stories
“ . . . [Marcus] possesses a narrative style fit for the waning years of this tired century: A muted voice that sounds something like Nathaniel West on a course of mild barbiturates . . . [The Captain’s Fire] brings to life the bleak, loony scene of today's hastily capitalized Eastern Bloc . . . he's made a haunting world come alive.” —Edward Neuert, Salon
“As people who have either lived abroad or traveled extensively will tell you, they often occupy a kind of ‘identity limbo’ when surrounded by or absorbed with the full character and culture of a country other than their own. Marcus sensitively explores that search mode of the expatriate or traveler's mind through young American Jew Joel LaVine's incessant observations, comparisons, and experiences . . . demonstrates the kind of curiosity, patience, and wisdom that cannot go unpraised.” —Booklist [on The Captain's Fire]
“Dozens of perfectly observed vignettes—the stories within these stories—are amplified when Marcus pieces them together. He is both knowing & impressionable, a brilliant new writer.” —Amy Hempel [on The Art of Cartography]
