J.S. Marcus Selected Works

In a comic, disturbing, intense, coming-of age novel that takes readers from the suburbs of Milwaukee to the ruins of the old Prussian capital of Konigsberg—and introduces them to skinheads, drag queens, and international hustlers—Marcus chronicles the exploits of a young American Jew who, in an alarmingly Oblomovian fashion, is becoming physically larger and larger.

The young men and women who inhabit these mordantly alive stories move around—as do the stories themselves—from city to city, country to country. The characters are in and out of graduate schools, apartments, love affairs, marriages. They go from New York to London to Los Angeles, compulsively studying the facts of their own lives and the facts they can guess at in the lives of those around them, as a way, perhaps out, of their solitude, as if they could map themselves into the world. They long for perspective, permanence—truth—although what they find is often something quite different.