Wikipedia / Ben Marcus
Wikipedia / Ben Marcus
Ben Marcus (born October 11, 1967) is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written five books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Life
Marcus grew up in Austin, the son of a retired mathematician and the literary critic and Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus. His father is Jewish and his mother is of Irish Catholic background; Marcus had a Bar Mitzvah.
Marcus received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University and an MFA from Brown University.
Marcus is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and the fiction editor at The American Reader. For several years he was the fiction editor of Fence.
Marcus is married to the writer Heidi Julavits, with whom he has two children. They live in New York City and also have a seasonal house in Maine.
Influences
Marcus's influences include Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Padgett Powell, J. M. Coetzee, David Ohle, Kōbō Abe, Garielle Lutz, and George Saunders.
Awards and honours
1999 Whiting Award
2000 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship in Fiction
2008 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
2013 Guggenheim Fellow
2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist Leaving the Sea
2014 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, shortlist, The Flame Alphabet
Bibliography
Novels
Notable American Women (2002)
The Flame Alphabet (2012)
Short story collections
The Age of Wire and String (1995)
Leaving the Sea (2014)
New American Stories (2015)
Notes from the Fog, Knopf, (2018),
Short stories
"Elevation of the Prison Bed", The Barcelona Review, 1997
The Father Costume (2002), novella with art by Matthew Ritchie
"The Dark Arts", The New Yorker, May 20, 2013
"The Loyalty Protocol", Granta 122: Betrayal, Winter 2013 (Subscription Required)
"The Grow Light Blues", The New Yorker, June 22, 2015
Tool, a short story written as a review of a woodworking tool
"Cold Little Bird", New Yorker, October 19, 2015
Other works
Text for the photography book by Kahn & Selesnick Scotlandfuturebog (2002). Aperture Foundation, New York City, .
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004), editor
The Moors (2010)
Chemical Seuss, from benmarcus.com
Thomas Bernhard, from benmarcus.com
On the Lyric Essay, from benmarcus.com
Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it: A correction, a response to an essay by Mr. Franzen, from Harpers.org
References
External links