In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as "the most audacious literary debut in decades," Ben Marcus weilds 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, find...

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run.Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh's life, as far as he is conce...

Considered one of the best baseball novels of all time, this black comedy about a discontented businessman's obsession with a fantasy baseball league of his own creation is "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" meets William Gaddis meets John Updike's Rabbit, Run.Somewhere in a "major-league" American city, there lives a man named J. Henry Waugh—no-account accountant, barfly, and country music fan. The most important part of Waugh's life, as far as he is conce...

This book tells the story of how fossil fuel use is altering the climate of our planet and adversely affecting the Earth's ecosystems and our ability to produce food, both of which are necessary to sustain civilization. The book addresses common questions regarding the science of climate change and why we should trust the warnings of climate scientists, rather than those who try to cast doubt on the science of climate change. To reinforce this, the first part of the book describes ...

In The Age of Wire and String 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 - ...

In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story . In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Noth...

Haunting in their tone, brilliant in their images––very like fantastic presences moving across glass––the twenty–one fictions in this startling debut collection seem both inexplicably familiar and like no writing we have seen before.The opening story leads us through a kaleidoscopic series of thoughts and memories around the act of writing a letter. Another, an intricately structured document of documents––household inventories, daily calendars, property deeds, an announcement––sug...

With over three hundred new and previously published short stories as well as three novellas, The Collected Stories of Diane Williams brings together distilled works of “unsettling brilliance” (Vanity Fair) that have rewritten the rules of American short fiction.From Ben Marcus’ introduction to The Collected Stories of Diane Williams:“Diane Williams has spent her long, prolific career concocting fictions of perfect strangeness, mo...

Stark and vibrant, the two halves of this sutured book expose the Frankenstein-like scars of the assemblage we call “human”In “Another Governess” a woman in a decaying manor tries to piece together her own story. In “The Least Blacksmith” a man cannot help but fail his older brother as they struggle to run their father’s forge.Each of the stories stands alone, sharing neither characters nor settings. But together, they ask the same question: What are the wa...

Ben Marcus returns with a collection of timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world. Here a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured from testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement; a father starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister; and two architects in a failing marriage must consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion as they construct a memorial to a terrorist attack. It’s these characters and others that over the co...

By turns hilarious and heartfelt, dark and illuminative, Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea is a ground breaking collection of stories from one of the single most vital, extraordinary, and unique writers of his generation.In the heartfelt “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 col...

The story of the simple skateboard is part thriller, part underground, underdog success tale. It’s chock-full of innovations, far-out graphic artistry, and ever-more-incredible hot-dogging feats. And the story’s told in this book with contributions from the stars themselves—Tony Hawk, Stacey Peralta, Jeff Ho, the Dogtown Z-Boys, and more. Beautifully illustrated with historical posters, ads, and memorabilia along with new action photography, studio skateboard shots, and unique portraits of...