The Age of Wire and String

Description

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.

Ben Marcus is the author of Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age of Wire and String and The Flame Alphabet. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, and McSweeney's. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. Marcus is an associate professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University.

The most audacious literary debut in decades - witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing - Robert Coover 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 Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful... all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home - Donald Antrim This novel has a place within the chaotic tradition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. novels are to reflect the complexities of the modern world, they must take on some of its messy characteristics... Intelligent and good-humoured - Andrew Biswell, Daily Telegraph The Age of Wire and String evades classification, persisting in your mind because of its psychotically ardent prose... It uses words as they once were, as incantations, as spells to summon up the contorted beings of the imagination - Matthew De Abaitua, The Idler Fragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments - written in some of the most breathtaking prose I've encountered lately - Rick Moody "