- Published: 02/05/2013
- ISBN: 9781847086396
- Granta Books
- pages
The Age of Wire and String
Ben Marcus
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 – both comic and disturbing – in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.
£14.99
A brain-rattling collection of experimental fictions... There are shades of Beckett in the playful obsessive language twiddling, and although the text is 18 years old, [it] still seems cutting edge
Stuart Hammond, Dazed & Confused
Transfixing... an extraordinary debut... A treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature. Multiple readings are rewarding
Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement
Frequently touching and funny... a cross between a scientific manual, Monty Python and a kind of Bible, with a surreal and opaque logic of its own
Christina Patterson, Observer
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.’