"Ben Marcus! So much should be said! His latest stories have been mined from the dark coal of the earth, where there is poisonous gas and anyone who spelunks will surely turn as sick and spiteful as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Thank goodness Ben Marcus has dirtied his hands for us. His stories are filled with disaster: flooding cities, eerily precocious children, architects with impossible tasks, brand new diseases. Surreal reading for your favorite beach or sinking ship."
Publisher Knopf
Publication Date 2018-08-21
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Spencer R.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781101947456
With these thirteen transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world--cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun. In "The Grow-Light Blues," a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer's newest nutrition supplement--the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son's precocity has turned sinister in the chilling "Cold Little Bird." In "Blueprints for St. Louis," two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment--a memorial to a terrorist attack. In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus's fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor. Blistering, beautiful work from a modern master. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor--blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.