Synopses & Reviews
Review
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. [If] 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
Synopsis
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.
About the Author
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 Writer's Award, a NEA Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is an associate professor at Columbia University.
CATRIN MORGAN studied illustration at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.
Table of Contents
ARGUMENT
SLEEP
Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife 23
Snoring, Accidental Speech 24
Sky Destroys Dog 26
Air Trance 16 27
The Death of Water 28
terms 32
GOD
Bird to the North, Act of Wind 37
Died 38
G-D 39
Landing on Floating Island of the Gods 40
Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas
That Contain Him 41
terms 44
FOOD
The Food Costumes of Montana 51
First Green 54
Brian, Treated to a Delicate Meal 57
Food Storms of the Original Brother 58
Hidden Food, from Above 62
terms 66
THE HOUSE
The Golden Monica 72
The Enemy in House Culture 77
Works from the War Between Houses and Wind 79
Exporting the Inner Man 86
Views from the First House 88
terms 94
ANIMAL
Dog, Mode of Heat Transfer in Barking 100
Silence Implies the Desire 102
Circle of Willis 104
Horse, Distinct Category 106
Where Birds Have Destroyed the Surface 107
terms 11
WEATHER
The Weather Killer 116
Continuous Winter, in Law 126
If
X > Fire 129
The Method She Employs Against That Which
Cannot Be Seen 130
The Religion 132
terms 136
PERSONS
Half-Life of Walter in the American Areas 142
Flap, Wire, and Name 144
The Animal Husband 146
Leg of Brother Who Died Early 164
Hidden Ball Inside a Song 166
terms 170
THE SOCIETY
Automobile, Watchdog 175
Swimming, Strictly an Inscription 176
Welder, Cessation of All Life 179
Arm, in Biology 180
Accountant, Vessel of Notice 182
Outline for a City 185
terms 188