Author Archive

The Grow-Light Blues — A new short story in The New Yorker

6.15.2015

“Carl Hirsch didn’t do holiday parties. At least, not correctly. All the so-called people, wind streaming from their faces. Fleshy machines spewing pollution, fucking up the environment. If he squinted, the celebrating bodies of his co-workers very nearly blistered into molecules, shining with color. Too often the whole of it—people, places, and things—looked to scatter. Everyone on the verge of turning to soup. So what if there was no precedent for a full-scale human melt, bodies reduced to liquid pouring from a window? You could still worry about it. Sometimes you had to.”

Read more.

U of Chicago — April 24

Fri, Apr 24, 1pm

Ben Marcus: In Conversation with Vu Tran

Logan Center, Seminar Terrace Room 801

Award-winning novelist and short fiction writer Ben Marcus appears in conversation with Vu Tran as part of the Kestnbaum Family Writer-in-Residence Program. Together, they’ll discuss the wide aesthetic range—from complex linguistic play to more conventionally propulsive narrative forms—in Marcus’s work and how he went about assembling his most recent story collection, Leaving the Sea.  Tran is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English at the University of Chicago.

Presented by the Kestnbaum Family Writer-in-Residence Program and the Committee on Creative Writing.

chicago

U of Chicago — April 23

Thu, Apr 23, 6pm

Reading by Ben Marcus

Logan Center, Performance Penthouse

Ben Marcus reads from his latest collection Leaving the Sea, which The New York Times describes as “a wonder and a cautionary tale all in one.” Marcus is the author of several books, including The Flame Alphabet and The Age of Wire and String. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and awards from Creative Capital and The American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Presented by the Kestnbaum Family Writer-in-Residence Program and the Committee on Creative Writing.

chicago

New Mexico State University — March 31

Tuesday, March 31 at 8pm

Puerto del Sol and the English Department of New Mexico State University will host a reading by author Ben Marcus.

Location: University Art Gallery

Valentin Stip — Esquis(e)

 

NYU Bookstore, New York — October 14

726 Broadway , New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-4678, Fax (212) 995-4118 E-mail Us

Tuesday, October 14, 6pm – 7:30pm
Ben Marcus

Marcus is the author of Leaving the Sea. In these piercing, brilliantly observed investigations into human vulnerability and failure, it is often the most absurd and alien predicaments that capture the deepest truths. Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.

Ben Marcus is the author of Notable American Women and The Age of Wire and String. His work has appeared in Grand Street, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. The recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Fellowship, a Guggenheim, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant, he is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

 

The Guardian reviews LEAVING THE SEA

4.17.2014

“Ben Marcus is one of the most stunningly original and profoundly unsettling writers of his generation. His subtle kinks of syntax, his daring choices of individual words and combinations of them, which seem a quarter tone out but somehow wholly right, the reiterated concerns – a pervading sense of guilt, the surrealism of sexuality, dangerous but necessary generational relationships – do not make for easy reading. That is not to say that he is a difficult writer; merely that he deals with strong emotional material in a unique and experimental style. Reading Marcus is liable to induce a kind of literary vertigo.”

Read the review.

St. Vincent — Digital Witness (Darkside Remix)

The New York Review of Books reviews LEAVING THE SEA

2.7.2014

“Marcus’s early writings strike me as extraordinary feats of transposition; their goal appears to be to create a linguistic simulacrum of a new medium or unknown dimension of being, in which familiar words and scenarios take on radically different kinds of implication, of weight or lightness, as if the laws of gravity had suddenly changed.”

Read the review.

Book People, Austin — February 11

Tuesday, Feb 11 at 7PM

BookPeople Presents Ben Marcus, author of Leaving the Sea.

BookPeople
603 N. Lamar
Austin, TX 78703

512-472-5050
800-853-9757

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