The Age of Wire and String | Granta

  • 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.

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

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.

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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.’