Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus (born October 11, 1967) is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

Life
Marcus grew up in Austin, the son of a retired mathematician and the literary critic and Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus. His father is Jewish and his mother is of Irish Catholic background; Marcus had a Bar Mitzvah.

Marcus received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University and an MFA from Brown University.

Marcus is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and the fiction editor at The American Reader. For several years he was the fiction editor of Fence.

He lives in New York City and is married to the writer Heidi Julavits. He has two children.

Influences
Marcus's influences include Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Padgett Powell, J. M. Coetzee, David Ohle, Kōbō Abe, Garielle Lutz, and George Saunders.

Awards and honours

 * 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist Leaving the Sea
 * 2014 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, shortlist, The Flame Alphabet
 * 2013 Guggenheim Fellow
 * 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship
 * 2009 Creative Capital Award for Innovative Literature
 * 2008 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
 * 1999 Whiting Award
 * 2000 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship in fiction, Creative writing
 * Pushcart Prize (three times)

Novels

 * Notable American Women (2002)
 * The Flame Alphabet (2012)

Short fiction

 * Collections
 * The Age of Wire and String (1995), short stories
 * Leaving the Sea (2014), short stories
 * New American Stories (2015), short stories
 * Notes from the Fog, Knopf, (2018), ISBN 978-1101947456 short stories
 * Stories
 * "Elevation of the Prison Bed", The Barcelona Review, 1997
 * The Father Costume (2002), novella with art by Matthew Ritchie
 * "The Dark Arts", The New Yorker, May 20, 2013
 * "The Loyalty Protocol", Granta 122: Betrayal, Winter 2013 (Subscription Required)
 * "The Grow Light Blues", The New Yorker, June 22, 2015
 * Tool, a short story written as a review of a woo
 * "Cold Little Bird", New Yorker, October 19, 2015
 * "Cold Little Bird", New Yorker, October 19, 2015

Other works

 * Text for the photography book by Kahn & Selesnick Scotlandfuturebog (2002). Aperture Foundation, New York City, ISBN 0-89381-935-2.
 * The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (2004), editor
 * The Moors (2010)
 * Chemical Seuss, from benmarcus.com
 * Thomas Bernhard, from benmarcus.com
 * On the Lyric Essay, from benmarcus.com
 * Why experimental fiction threatens to destroy publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and life as we know it: A correction, a response to an essay by Mr. Franzen, from Harpers.org