Author(s): Ben Marcus

Short Stories | Read our reviews! | Fiction Reductions | Art

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.

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:
This book is a sort of fictional encyclopedia of pretty much everything you don't understand about the world but were unable quite to pinpoint and about which you are unable even to find the right sort of words to express your confusion. Familiar things and their meanings have been separated and allowed to settle in new patterns of association, clotted together by the adhesive properties of language, giving rise to new science, new culture, new emotions. Marcus is set against the deadening effect of familiarity; really, his Age of Wire and String is no more savage, tender and surprising than the world we take for granted every day: the problems he describes are the very same ones that already throng the skin dividing our internal world from our external (a concept demonstrably arbitrary and invertible) but to which we have become numbed and unobservant. This book will certainly not help you to understand anything any better, but it will make your confusion immaculate and add to it dimensions of awe and beauty that you had hitherto not suspected. This new edition pairs Marcus's text with Morgan's equally >>obtuse and intriguing illustrations.

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The most audacious literary debut in decades - witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing - Robert Coover
Transfixing... an extraordinary debut... A treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature. Multiple readings are rewarding - Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement
Frequently touching and funny... a cross between a scientific manual, Monty Python and a kind of Bible, with a surreal and opaque logic of its own - Christina Patterson, Observer
Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful... all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home - Donald Antrim
This novel has a place within the chaotic tradition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. [If] novels are to reflect the complexities of the modern world, they must take on some of its messy characteristics... Intelligent and good-humoured - Andrew Biswell, Daily Telegraph
The Age of Wire and String evades classification, persisting in your mind because of its psychotically ardent prose... It uses words as they once were, as incantations, as spells to summon up the contorted beings of the imagination - Matthew De Abaitua, The Idler
Fragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments - written in some of the most breathtaking prose I've encountered lately - Rick Moody