Marfa Book Company
A reading from The Flame Alphabet
13 March, 2010
6pm
Marfa Book Company
105 South Highland
Marfa, Texas 79843
432-729-3906
Posts Tagged ‘Ben Marcus’
Ben Marcus – March 13
The Moors
This is an excerpt of a story that appears in the current issue of Tin House (#42).
At work today, Thomas the Dead, as he had privately named himself, made a grave miscalculation by using baby talk with a colleague. (more…)
Notable American Women
Vintage Books, 2002
On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.
Thomas Bernhard
First published in Harper’s, November 2006.
Thomas Bernhard, the ranting, death-obsessed Austrian novelist and playwright who died in 1989, was the ultimate Nestbeschmutzer, soiling his country with screeds against the landscape, the people, and their history. (more…)
The Age of Wire and String
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995
Dalkey Archive Press, 1997
In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as “the most audacious literary debut in decades,” Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus’s first collection — part fiction, part handbook– as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings.
Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations — both comic and disturbing — in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.
On the Lyric Essay
First published in The Believer, July, 2003.
The Genre Artist
If a story takes place, as we are told stories do, then who or what does it take that place from, and why is an acquisition verb—take—necessary to describe the activity of stories? (more…)
Chemical Seuss
First published in Conjunctions: 29, 1997.
THE HARMING OF MEANING
I mean to discuss certain reveries of reading that occurred during the interment of childhood I served in my parents’ home, reveries often centering around Seuss and his extreme attack on sense. (more…)
