Published: 30/08/2018
ISBN: 9781783782833
Granta Books
288 pages

Notes from the Fog

Ben Marcus

‘I wake up and I have to make the right choice,’ he said.

Master-stylist Ben Marcus returns with a wonder-cabinet of brain-rearranging stories. From the horrifyingly strange to the deeply touching, each story is a literary masterclass unlikely to leave the reader unchanged.
From parent/child relationships thrown agonisingly off kilter, to intensely moving scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Ben Marcus is the great chronicler of the contemporary uncanny and the peculiar future.
Piece by piece, he takes us apart.

[A] brutal and brilliant story collection...Marcus is at once funny and serious, a characteristic blend ... Is this a bleak book? Absolutely. But there's beauty in it, too... deceptively straightforward, precise but chatty, and often a lot of fun

Chris Power, Guardian

Marcus's penchant for creeping presentiment elevates these tales ... blending noir suspense with brooding inwardness in an elegant prose style that is distinctively his own... Marcus is a brilliant anatomist of estrangement

Houman Barekat, Irish Times

Marcus's spectacular new collection [is] wickedly effective ... The sheer line-by-line joy of his phrase-making, caught between strung-out melancholy and tart misanthropy, electric with thrilling change-ups...Exhilaratingly bleak

Anthony Cummins, Observer

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 →