Ben Marcus
Ben Marcus
Ben Marcusis the author of four books of fiction. His latest book, Leaving the Sea: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in January 2014...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
wise art pain
RHETORIC The art of making life less believable; the calculated use of language, not to alarm but to do full harm to our busy minds and properly dispose our listeners to a pain they have never dreamed of. The context of what can be known establishes that love and indifference are forms of language, but the wise addition of punctuation allows us to believe that there are other harms - the dash gives the reader the clear signal they are coming.
embrace judaism complexity
Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
grief bigs dose
I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
parent balance example
My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
thinking hands worry
The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches.
motivation home labs
Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
space care unlocking
In some sense, prose fiction is just a way of unlocking a space. If I can unlock the space, it comes out and it's vivid, I find that I care about it, and it's part of me.
love like-being-alone dry
Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow; nothing counted; I could not be harmed; I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.
self body sometimes
A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
children fiction faces
Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
fiction complicated breaking-down
Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
writing emotional levels
When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
kids parent accountability
It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
technology safe way
Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth.