Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus shapes fiction as a writer and editor, moving between experimental invention and emotional unease. His books include The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, Leaving the Sea, and Notes from the Fog. He has taught at Columbia University since 2000 and received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and a Whiting Writers Award. For New American Stories, Marcus worked as editor rather than sole author. Vintage published the anthology in 2015, bringing established and emerging writers into a 784-page survey of contemporary American short fiction. The selection places realism, experimental work, melancholy, humor, and hybrid forms beside one another without proposing a single approved national style. It follows his earlier editorial project The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, allowing him to revisit how the field had changed in America. New American Stories shows Marcus as a curator making an argument through juxtaposition, while his own fiction demonstrates one of the boundary-testing traditions the collection maps.