New American Stories | Granta

  • Published: 09/07/2015
  • ISBN: 9781783781492
  • Granta Books
  • 784 pages

New American Stories

Ben Marcus

The short story is a barometer for the state and shape of literature. New American Stories presents the boldest, most innovative and most resonant fiction coming out of the American literary scene.

Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea, has here curated an anthology that gives the lay of the literary land. From established masters of the form like Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis to neoteric trailblazers such as Rebecca Curtis and Rachel B. Glaser, this collection sees Marcus trying to ‘prove that the distinctions we erect between styles and approaches to fiction can be essentially meaningless’. The result is a must-read, must-own volume for readers of literary fiction.

A landmark collection... It's a book to wrestle with as well as enjoy; one that forces you to assess and reassess your own sense of what makes a story any good - even of what makes a story a story. At once absolutely contemporary and timeless

James Lasdun, Guardian

A generous and beautifully designed brick of an anthology... [With writing that is] audaci[ous] and exuberant... it's a well-weighted collection confidently establishing a centre of gravity for American fiction

Jonathan Gibbs, Independent

A snapshot of the past decade from across the pond

Max Liu, Books of the Year, Independent

The Author

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Ben Marcus on Granta.com

Fiction | Granta 133

George and Elizabeth

Ben Marcus

‘She could see, or was starting to, that someone out there was seeing him, watching him.’

In Conversation | Granta 133

George Saunders and Ben Marcus In Conversation

George Saunders & Ben Marcus

‘One purpose of art is to get us to wake up, recalibrate our emotional life, get ourselves into proper relation to reality.’

Fiction | Granta 122

The Loyalty Protocol

Ben Marcus

‘The tally, indeed, on that particular activity, in that particular location – or, in fact, on any couch ever – was, indeed, zero.’