Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Newtonville Books
10 Langley Road
Newton Centre
Newton, MA 02459
617-244-6619
Ben Marcus, author of Leaving the Sea. Introduced by Post Road Magazine editor, Christopher Boucher, author of How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive.
1.26.2014
“Ben Marcus achieved the startling visions of his first story collection, “The Age of Wire and String,” and the novels “Notable American Women” and “The Flame Alphabet” largely by placing the reader in strange and unfamiliar worlds that turned out to be our world after all. The stories of his new collection, “Leaving the Sea,” still contain peculiar linguistic and perceptual tics, but he has added to his arsenal narratives that are less relentlessly unfamiliar, less rigorously dis-enchanted, populated by characters full of longing and visible regret…”
1.15.2014
“”Leaving the Sea” includes some of the best stories I have read in years. If you haven’t yet read Marcus, “Leaving the Sea” is a magnificent, and magnificently discomfiting, place to start.”
Kelly Link, Alexander Maksik, Ben Marcus
We are ushering in the new year with one of the best literary magazines on this side of the ozone layer. We are so thrilled to be hosting Tin House, as well as these fine Tin House folk:
BEN MARCUS (Leaving the Sea, The Flame Alphabet, etc)
ALEXANDER MAKSIK (A Marker to Measure Drift, You Deserve Nothing)
KELLY LINK (Pretty Monsters, Magic for Beginners, etc)
8 pm at the corner of Second St. and Avenue A. 2A in the upstairs bar. As always, there will be $4 whiskeys on special for you all and there will be some books to peruse and purchase in the back.
Visit http://www.tinhouse.com/
*2A is located at the southwest corner of Second Street and Avenue A and the readings take place in the upstairs bar. Nearest subways include the F at 2nd Avenue, the 6 at Bleecker, the BD at Grand or the JMZ at Essex.
In conversation with Daniel Levin Becker
Tuesday, January 21, 2014, 7:00 P.M., City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco
Ben Marcus reads from
Leaving the Sea: Stories
from Knopf
From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts—and his range—as never before.
In the hilarious, lacerating “I Can Say Many Nice Things,” a washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian “Rollingwood,” a divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In “Watching Mysteries with My Mother,” a son meditates on his mother’s mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking sentence, we watch as the narrator’s marriage and his sanity unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.
As the collection progresses, we move from more traditional narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a groundbreaking master of the short form. In these otherworldly landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover total childhood innocence; an automaton discovers love and has to reinvent language to accommodate it; filial loyalty is seen as a dangerous weakness that must be drilled away; and the distance from a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential wasteland, requiring heroic effort.
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 stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, and elsewhere. The recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is a Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor of The Believer, the author of Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature (Harvard, 2012), the translator of Georges Perec’s La Boutique Obscure (Melville House, 2013), and the youngest member of the Oulipo – ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or workshop for potential literature founded in 1961 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. He lives in San Francisco.
Reading and signing
Sunday, January 19th @ 7:30pm
Powell’s City of Books on Burnside
1005 W Burnside (800) 878-7323
From Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of his generation, comes an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases his gifts — and his range — as never before. 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 (Knopf) is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
Preorder a signed edition of Leaving the Sea from Powell’s.
1.10.2014
“The stories in Leaving the Sea range a great deal in terms of style, from a fairly realistic portrayal of intergenerational domestic conflict to a ribbon of metafiction consisting of a single run-on-and-on sentence. Underlying all the diversity, however, is a consistent set of anxieties surrounding the alienated figure of the contemporary middle-aged American male. What Ben Marcus offers is a sort of literary shock treatment for these shut-ins.”
1.8.2014
“It’s a recurring theme in Leaving the Sea that violently destructive forces lurk both inside and out.”
1.7.2014
“As the book progresses Marcus tears up the rulebook completely. And it works beautifully. Words are rearranged on the page and meanings are deconstructed. The world we have entered into, Marcus explains, is “dreamlike, with artificial colors.””
1.2.2014
“The protagonists in Marcus’s new collection of disturbing and excruciatingly funny short stories (several of them first published in The New Yorker) are socially inappropriate, alienated from their lovers and relatives, anxious, bitter, mortified, lonely—“you could pretty much go shopping from a list of adjectives,” as one character puts it.”
Read more.
