9.13.2018
“[T]he genius of the collection is that despite the opaque and baroque style, it packs a punch about loneliness, obsession, illness, grief and suffering. He is the great pathologist of contemporary letters: from the Greek meaning the study of pain. In these stories, language buckles and twists in an attempt to convey what the pain of others might be like.”
Read the review here.
…
Reading and Q&A.
Monday, October 15, 2018
Powell’s City of Books
1005 W Burnside St.
Portland, OR 97209
(map/directions)
…
Reading and conversation with special guest.
Thursday, Sept 27, 7:30 pm
Greenlight Bookstore
686 Fulton street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
…
Reading and Q&A
Thursday, September 6 at 7:30pm
Skylight Books
Talk/Q&A
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Notes from the Fog
Ben Marcus
Alfred A. Knopf, August 21, 2108
With these thirteen transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world–cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.
In The Grow-Light Blues, a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement–the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister in the chilling Cold Little Bird. In Blueprints for St. Louis, two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment–a memorial to a terrorist attack.
In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus’s fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author’s compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor. Blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.
A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author’s compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor–blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.
Some reviews:
Publishers Weekly
The Millions
BBC
Lithub
Harper’s
Nylon
Vanity Fair
The Paris Review
AV Club
Alfred A. Knopf, August 21, 2018
Pre-order now.
With these thirteen transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world–cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.
In “The Grow-Light Blues,” a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement–the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister in the chilling “Cold Little Bird.” In “Blueprints for St. Louis,” two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment–a memorial to a terrorist attack.
In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus’s fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author’s compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor. Blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.
A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author’s compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor–blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.
Some reviews:
The Scotsman
The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
The Millions
BBC
Lithub
Harper’s
Nylon
Vanity Fair
The Paris Review
AV Club
7.13.2018
“How hard could it be,” a designer muses of one of her firm’s pet R&D projects, “to finally reach into people’s faces and claw away at what they were thinking.” If anyone can cure you of the rankly sentimental notion that all human creatures yearn to be understood, it may be a writer of fiction. Notes from the Fog (Knopf, $26.95), Ben Marcus’s new story collection, shows a persistent awareness of the violence involved in interpretation—of the difficulty of fully understanding something without in the process destroying it.
NOTES FROM THE FOG is reviewed in the August, 2018 issue of Harper’s.
A short story, published in The New Yorker, on May 29, 2018
“There is only one road out of here, and everyone we know is on it, moaning silently, I imagine, gently rending their summer linens at this unwelcome disruption. It gets tiring waving at them all—stressed-out, wrinkled accidents of the human form, with white hair, or no hair, or nubby yellow sun visors, grimacing, hunched over their steering wheels, as if they were being chased by men with guns.”
Read the story at The New Yorker.
