By Ben Marcus
Paperback ISBN: 9781628975710
Ebook ISBN: 9781628975901
Publication Date: 10/22/2024
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.
"An extraordinary first novel.... The Age of Wire and String, a treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature." —Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement
Ben Marcus was born in Chicago in 1967. The son of a mathematician and a literary scholar, he was raised in the Midwest, Austin, London, Aarhus, and New York. He holds degrees from New York University and Brown University, and has taught at schools in Texas, Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island. In addition to The Age of Wire and String, he is also the author of Notable American Women, Leaving the Sea, New American Stories, and Notes from the Fog.