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Behind the Book Reading Series Come hear the future: Join us at the Behind the Book Reading Series at KGB Bar on May 11, 2006 as Ben Marcus, literary phenom and professor in Columbia University's MFA program, emcees an evening featuring the next wave of literary talent-eight graduating Columbia MFA students. WHEN: Thursday, May 11, 2006, from 7:00-9:00pm. Admission Free. WHO: Ben Marcus is an Associate Professor in the Writing Division at Columbia University. He is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String, and an anthology, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His collaboration with the painter Terry Winters, Turbulence Skins, was exhibited in 2004. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, The Believer, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, Conjunctions, Nerve, Black Clock, Grand Street, Cabinet, Parkett, The Village Voice, Poetry, and BOMB. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Award, three Pushcart Prizes, a fellowship from the Howard Foundation, and a Whiting Writer's Award, among others. For several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. He has taught at Brown, Old Dominion University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Lehman College, CUNY. Mr. Marcus received an M.F.A. from Brown University. Jeff Bender grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received a BA in English at Davidson College before returning to his hometown to teach high school. He is honored to be reading among his friends from Columbia. Keri Bertino is in the MFA fiction program at Columbia University. Melissa Jones grew up in California and currently lives in Manhattan. She is working on a collection of short stories and a novel that deal with family dynamics and economic class in rural communities. Reif Larsen was the product of a fleeting summer solstice tryst between a brutish Norwegian whaler and an asthmatic Sultaness from Qatar who was fleeing the dictatorial grip of her parents. A Pisces, he enjoys backgammon, mechanical children, and cosmonaut romance novels. He hopes to one day circumnavigate the globe by jogging gently backwards. Kara Levy is originally from Maryland. She now lives in New York by way of several other locations, the most earnest of which is Philly, the most surly of which is Prague. She is working on a collection of short stories about illness and other betrayals of the body, and on two novels: one about a group of HIV-positive illegal immigrants in Rome, and another about the battle between sex and religion for a young Orthodox Jewish woman in modern-day New York City. Amanda Marie Pennelly is working on an MFA in fiction at Columbia University. Before moving to New York City, she was a reporter for a handful of newspapers in Oregon and New Mexico. A cultural cornucopia herself, she spends a lot of time creating fictional misfits to keep her company. She is currently working on a collection of imaginary friends. Anna Selver-Kassell was born and raised in New York City. She's currently working on a short story collection, and she's very happy to be reading at KGB with her peers and her friends. Helene Wecker grew up in suburban Chicago. She received a BA in English at Carleton College, which qualified her for a series of office jobs in Minneapolis and Seattle. She now lives in Morningside Heights with her husband, and she makes a mean grilled cheese sandwich. REVIEWS: Ben MarcusFor Notable American Women This deadpan dystopian novel documents the upbringing of a man who has been conditioned to have no emotions. In an alternate reality dominated by radical, powerful women known as the Silentists, the hero is subjected to laborious behavioral regimens including a regular 'language fast,' the elaborate 'Thompson Food Scheme,' and frequent swims in the 'learning pond.' But, with the heightened sensitivity of the dispossessed, he can't stop identifying the ways that life could be richer, and the result is like an anthropologist on hallucinogens. 'I should be able to breathe without the sky suffering from lack of birds,' he ruefully tells us. Although the novel's philosophical aims are at times frustratingly obscure, this 'collision between satire and sadness,' as the author has called it, is a dizzying reimagination of our relationship to language. If we're not at the epicenter of that collision, we're close enough so that the aftershock rattles our teeth. - New Yorker Those of us who were captivated by Marcus's debut, The Age of Wire and String, will welcome this latest addition to what is
destined to become a very significant body of work. Marcus negotiates an esoteric though uniquely American literary terrain, mining
such seemingly diverse sources as Gertrude Stein and Donald Barthelme. One of the virtues of this novel is that although it deals
with issues of great significance such as gender, childhood, and coming of age, it is not easy to describe or paraphrase. Marcus
reinvents the family drama in the story of a boy who grows up without feelings amidst a conspiracy of women obsessed with weather
and silence. The book evokes an alternate reality revealing the dark side of our common history, an uncanny version of America
that exists nowhere else but in Marcus's lyrical, abstract prose. This will be a difficult read for many, but it will surely stand
the test of time as a genuinely important book. Conceptual daring, deadpan humor and dizzying forays into allegory mark Marcus's first novel, the semi-science-fictional tale of a
boy raised in a futuristic Ohio by his experimentalist parents and a sect of radical women Silentists….Marcus (The Age of Wire and
String) has crafted a dystopian novel in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984, with an overlay of 21st-
century irony and faux na…vet?….stretches of the novel are inspired riffs on contemporary totems and anxieties. Ambitious and polished,
if sometimes willfully opaque, this is an intriguing debut. Ben Marcus's first novel Notable American Women is a beautifully strange and compelling family allegory-Midwest mum and dad
raise their son to shun all emotions-rendered in language that seems imported from a universe of deepest feeling, of intellect, of
poetry, and, in the end, of majestic heart. [A] darkly funny caricature of modern life. Ben Marcus has been accused of redesigning the ordinary sentence, of emptying words of their meaning and injecting them with new, of
treating grave matters (such as family and humankind in general) with farcical disrespect, and of blowing away traditional narrative
structures with a diabolical wind. And all this may be true. But for those who would describe this work as fantastic, surreal, or
anti-real, I can only say that this is Ohio exactly as I remember it. Jane Dark was my fourth grade teacher. I don't use the word lightly, in fact, I don't use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally
engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified-
he makes the word new and thus the world. Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare
gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to
neither; it is a brave, original book. Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the
world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though
granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be.
Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative. Ben Marcus's novel is funny and touching and full of movement and sound, all of which is even more remarkable since the book itself
is about stillnesses and The Silentists and Behavior Water and things you put in your mouth to keep you from speaking. Marcus
investigates-with equal passion-the intricacies of a new mythology alongside the intimacies of a broken family. This is the kind
of strange and beautiful book you just want to have around, to dip into again and again. Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O'Brien, Orwell, Paley,
Borges-and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice. Ben Marcus's Notable American Women is a radical performance in American fiction….It is killingly funny, and creepily sad….
It is a profound and profane description of our basest drive: fear. Notable American Women is the work of a retiring albeit
twisted virtuoso. Not for the pusillanimous reader. For Age of Wire and String: Stories In these 41 fictions (most are only a page or two), Marcus guides us through the postmodern wreckage of our homes and social customs.
Deformed structures call for deformed expressions; using a form pioneered by Gertrude Stein, the book's eight sections pull the
everyday (Food; The House; Persons) through the looking-glass of language, coining new terms as necessary. The result is the combination
of gorgeous, sensuous realism and disjointed action…. The most audacious literary debut in decades: witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing, language itself
held together here by whimsical bits of wire and string. Ben Marcus is a one-of-a-kind stand-up phenom, a comic writer of power
and originality. The Age of Wire and String marks the arrival of a unique new talent in American letters. | |||