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Ben Marcus

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Seemingly the most conspicuous aspect of Ben Marcus' work, to date, is its expansion on one of the most primary concerns of the original Surrealist authors -- perhaps most typified by Benjamin Péret, husband of the acclaimed painter Remedios Varo -- this being a very deep interest in the psychological service and implication of symbols and the manners by which those symbols can be maneuvered and rejuxtaposed in order to provoke new ideas or new points of view -- in other words, the creation of, in a sense, conscious dreams.

While Marcus' writing plays similarly with the meanings of words by either stripping them of their intended meaning or juxtaposing them with other words in critical ways, it also abandons the 'experimental' nature of so much of the Surrealists' writing for stories that describe human psychology and the human condition through a means that has in later years become notably more subjective and sensory in nature than that used in the broad range of fiction, both 'conventional' and 'nonconventional'.

The surreal nature of Marcus' work derives in part from the fact that it comprises sentences that are exact in their structure and syntax, but whose words, though familiar, appear to have abandoned their ordinary meanings; they can be read as experiments in the ways in which language and syntax themselves work to create structures of meaning. Common themes that emerge are family, the Midwest, science, mathematics, and religion, although their treatment in Marcus's writing lends to new interpretations and conceptualizations of those concepts.

Marcus was born in Chicago. He attended New York University and Brown University, and currently teaches writing at Columbia University where he was recently promoted to head of the writing MFA program. He is the son of Jane Marcus, a noted feminist critic and Virginia Woolf scholar. He is married to novelist Heidi Julavits.

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Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus

Books from Ben Marcus

Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

The Age of Wire and String

Leaving the Sea: Stories

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

Notes from the Fog: Stories

The Flame Alphabet

The Father Costume: Ben Marcus and Matthew Ritchie

The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

The Moors

Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych

Por qué la literatura experimental amenaza con destruir la edición, a Jonathan Franzen y la vida tal y como la conocemos

š! #25 Gaijin Mangaka

Glimmer Train Stories, #89

Watching Mysteries With My Mother

Scotlandfuturebog

The Ex-Files: New Stories About Old Flames

klub zin #2: the other one

An Unknown Power

Bomb: The Author Interviews

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories