Notes from the Fog, Ben Marcus
Notes from the Fog, Ben Marcus
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Notes from the Fog
Stories

Author: Ben Marcus

Narrator: Rebecca Gibel, Charlie Thurston

Unabridged: 9 hr 40 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/19/2018

Categories: Fiction, Short Stories


Synopsis

With these thirteen transfixing, ingenious stories, Ben Marcus gives us timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world—cosmically and comically apt. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

In "The Grow-Light Blues," a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured testing his employer's newest nutrition supplement—the enhanced glow from his computer monitor. A father finds himself outcast from his family when he starts to suspect that his son's precocity has turned sinister in the chilling "Cold Little Bird." In "Blueprints for St. Louis," two architects in a flailing marriage consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion in mourners at their latest assignment—a memorial to a terrorist attack.

In the bizarre but instantly recognizable universe of Ben Marcus's fiction, characters encounter both surreal new illnesses and equally surreal new cures. Marcus writes beautifully, hilariously, and obsessively, about sex and death, lust and shame, the indignities of the body, and the full parade of human folly. A heartbreaking collection of stories that showcases the author's compassion, tenderness, and mordant humor—blistering, beautiful work from a modern master.

About Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction: The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, Notable American Women, and The Age of Wire and String. He has edited two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His writing has appeared in Harper's, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, McSweeney's, Granta, and the New York Times. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award, the Berlin Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, a Guggenheim fellowship, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Carmen on June 21, 2018

If he loves me, it is because that may open the portal for more cuddles and touches. That's all. He needs to be swaddled, and I just happen to be nearby. If I ever dare to walk past him without touching his hand or stopping to outright kiss him, he pouts all day and looks up at me with mournful eyes......more

Goodreads review by Kevin on October 20, 2018

You may have heard rumors that Ben Marcus has eased up on his weird style in recent years and that may be 15% true, but I'll reassure you: There is no one writing like Ben Marcus and this book is so darkly weird, so sentence-drivenly spectacular, so other-worldly while still being recognizably in ou......more

Goodreads review by Robert on April 01, 2019

I got on the Ben Marcus train about 4 years ago and never looked back. This latest collection is so tight and weird--he's up there with the best of the new fiction right alongside Brian Evenson. Marcus has one of the most unique voices in short fiction: dark, modest and at times absolutely hilarious......more

Goodreads review by Anthony on August 09, 2018

Ben Marcus speaks in tongues that are not wholly our own, and the things he does with language often make it seem as if you're hearing an unfamiliar tongue muttering hideous, hilarious things from another room, like if you were staying in the hotel room directly across from Celine Dion's Vegas suite......more

Goodreads review by Daisy on June 06, 2021

I was dubious about this when I saw that Marcus had been name checked by Alexandra Kleeman the author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine which I had just finished and hated. This collection of stories was rather bland, I don't remember any of them in detail and they were all samey in style and char......more