The Age of Wire and String

by Ben Marcus, Catrin Morgan (Illustrator)

Overview

In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection - part fiction, part handbook - as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations - both comic and disturbing - in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847086396
Publisher:	Granta Books
Publication date:	05/02/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

BEN MARCUS is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York.

CATRIN MORGAN studied illustration at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.

Ben Marcus is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York.
Catrin Morgan studied illustration at The Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.

Read an Excerpt

From Sleep: Intercourse with Resuscitated Wife: Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household's walls by stalling its flow to the outlets. As such, an improvised friction needs to take the place of electricity, to goad the natural currents back to their proper levels. This is achieved with the dead wife. She must be found, revived, and then penetrated until heat fills the room, until the toaster is shooting bread onto the floor, until she is smiling beneath you with black teeth and grabbing your bottom. Then the vacuum rides by and no one is pushing it, it is on full steam. Days flip past in chunks of fake light, and the intercourse is placed in the back of the mind. But it is always there, that moving into a static-ridden corpse that once spoke familiar messages in the morning when the sun was new.
Snoring, Accidental Speech: Snoring, language disturbance caused by accidental sleeping, in which a person speaks in compressed syllables and bulleted syntax, often stacking several words over one another in a distemporal deliverance of a sentence. The snoring person can be stuffed with cool air to slow the delivery of its language, but perspiration froths at key points on the hips and back when artificial air is introduced, and thus the sleep becomes sketchy and riddled with noise. It is often best to cull the sleeper forth with apneic barks—sounds produced without air. The effect of the barks is to isolate each aspect of the snore sound by slowing down the delivery—riding the sleeper until the snore breaks into separate words. Decoders should sit on the bed and jostle the sleeper's stomach. This further dispatches the clusters that often form when the sleeper speaks all at once (snores). The decoder is then better able to decipher the word blocks. When analyzed, the messages are often simple. Pull me out, they say, the water has risen to the base of my neck.

Table of Contents

ARGUMENT

SLEEP

Intercourse With Resuscitated Wife

Snoring, Accidental Speech

Sky Destroys Dog

Air Trance 16

The Death of Water

Terms

GOD

Bird to the North, Act of Wind

Died

G-D

Landing on Floating Island of the Gods

Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas That Contain Him

Terms

FOOD

The Food Costumes of Montana

First Green

Brian, Treated to a Delicate Meal

Food Storms of the Original Brother

Hidden Food, from Above

Terms

THE HOUSE

The Golden Monica

The Enemy in House Culture

Works from the War Between Houses and Wind

Exporting the Inner Man

Views from the First House

Terms

ANIMAL

Dog, Mode of Heat Transfer in Barking

Silence Implies the Desire

Circle of Willis

Horse, Distinct Category

Where Birds Have Destroyed the Surface

Terms

WEATHER

The Weather Killer

Continuous Winter, in Law

If X > Fire

The Method She Employs Against That Which Cannot Be Seen

The Religion

Terms

PERSONS

Half-Life of Walter in the American Areas

Flap, Wire, and Name

The Animal Husband

Leg of Brother Who Died Early

Hidden Ball Inside a Song

Terms

THE SOCIETY

Automobile, Watchdog

Swimming, Strictly an INscription

Welder, Cessation of All Life

Arm, in Biology

Accountant, Vessel of Notice

Outline for a City

Terms

What People are Saying About This

Donald Antrim

Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful. A world appears made of birds, dogs, odd bits of the Self, and the ancient impressions of the very first thingsFather and Mother, strange foods, a storm in the sky outsideall the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home.

Robert Coover

The most audacious literary debut in decadeswitty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing, language itself held together here by whimsical bits of wire and string. Ben Marcus is a one-of-a-kind stand-up phenom, a comic writer of power and originality. The Age of Wire and String marks the arrival of a unique new talent in American letters.

Editorial Reviews

Some things can be admired though not fully understood. . . . So it is with Ben Marcus Age of Wire and String. Here are stories so undeniably brilliant, so amazingly fresh, yet so strange.

Dallas Morning News

An extraordinary first novel. . . . The Age of Wire and String, a treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature.

Times Literary Supplement

Marcus proves himself a renegade philosopher/writer who twists language until it bleeds new meaning, and in the process creates a truly audacious and wholly original view of life.

Tucson Weekly

"An extraordinary first novel.... The Age of Wire and String, a treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature." —Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher