Notes from the Fog

Ben Marcus returns with a collection of timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world. Here a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured from testing his employer’s newest nutrition supplement; a father starts to suspect that his son’s precocity has turned sinister; and two architects in a failing marriage must consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion as they construct a memorial to a terrorist attack. It’s these characters and others that over the course of thirteen short stories showcase Marcus’s compassion, imagination, and mordant humor. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction—The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea—and the editor of two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.