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.
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.
5.3.2018
New stories forthcoming in summer issues of Bomb,The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
5.25.2016
“Two radical projects of reappraisal emerge as you make your way through the nearly 800 pages of Ben Marcus’s anthology of New American Stories.”
Read the review.
10.19.2015
It started with bedtime. A coldness. A formality.
Martin and Rachel tucked the boy in, as was their habit, then stooped to kiss him good night.
“Please don’t do that,” he said, turning to face the wall.
They took it as teasing, flopped onto his bed to nuzzle and tickle him.
The boy turned rigid, endured the cuddle, then barked out at them, “I really don’t like that!”
“Jonah?” Martin said, sitting up.
“I don’t want your help at bedtime anymore,” he said. “I’m not a baby. You have Lester. Go cuddle with him.”
“Sweetheart,” Rachel said. “We’re not helping you. We’re just saying good night. You like kisses, right? Don’t you like kisses and cuddles? You big silly.”
Jonah hid under the blankets. A classic pout. Except that he wasn’t a pouter, he wasn’t a hider. He was a reserved boy who generally took a scientific interest in the tantrums and emotional extravagances of other children, marvelling at them as though they were some strange form of street theatre.
Read more.
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.
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.”
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.”
