Ben Marcus Biography

Ben Marcus is an acclaimed writer and novelist He is the author of four books of fiction and his stories essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's The New Yorker The Paris Review Granta The New York Times GQ Salon McSweeney's Time and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader.
One of the rising stars of American letters Ben Marcus has become known for his wildly imaginative often experimental and deeply psychological novels and short stories. His highly lauded 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet follows the lives of Sam and Claire as they try to escape from a world in which children’s speech—even that of their own loving daughter—has become lethal. His second novel Notable American Women is told primarily by a narrator who shares the author’s name and whose father asks “How can one word from Ben Marcus’s rotten filthy heart be trusted?” His first collection of stories Leaving the Sea was released by Knopf in 2014.
Marcus’s writing has been widely acclaimed by critics and writers alike—he’s the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes a Whiting Writers Award a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also awarded a fiction fellowship from Brown University where he taught for several years before joining the faculty at Columbia where he currently teaches. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s the New Yorker the Paris Review the Believer the New York Times Salon McSweeney’s the Village Voice BOMB Poetry and Time Magazine. He is the editor of the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and for several years was the fiction editor of Fence.

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