When I’ve finished, it’s hard to believe that I ever could have cared so much, but I did, for a little while, and then it’s time to hunt down something new to care about and to hope that I have the ability to make it exist in fiction. Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. That’s what it is to start a project: engineering a set of delusions that the act of writing has consequence and simply must be done. Part of the beginning of any project is the discovery of what matters to me, followed by an attempt to conceive of it in terms of fiction. Or what I care about doesn’t fit so obviously inside the boundaries of what I consider fiction. So, to me, writer’s block is a sign that I probably ultimately don’t give enough of a shit. I also don’t write so sharply if I don’t care about what I’m doing, and caring is hard to fake. It is exhausting to be obsessed and driven and full of some pressing need to write-and it doesn’t happen very often. He is the narrator of the novel as well as the unwilling and ineffective breeder for this cult who.

There is far too much out there that hasn’t been read enough. Ben Marcus fabricates-in more ways than one-a world of strange activity and odd philosophy. Writing is not exactly a scarce resource. The world will be just fine without anything I might write. Ben Marcus is author of a novel, Notable American Women, to be published by Vintage in March, and a book of stories, The Age of Wire and String. It’s not clear that I am meant to pump out writing at all costs. It happens when writing is an obligation and not a desire. Therefore it happens nearly all of the time. Writer’s block, if that’s the name for it, happens when I am boring, when my mind is flat, when I have nothing to add to what has been said and done. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow in 2013-14, he has also received grants from the Creative Capital Foundation (2009), a 2008 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes.Ben Marcus’s Notes From the Fog is out now. Marcus studied philosophy at New York University (BA, 1989) and fiction writing at Brown University (MFA, 1991).

Marcus is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and serves as the fiction editor for The American Reader. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, New Yorker, Paris Review, The Believer, New York Times, McSweeney’s, and other publications. Ben Marcus is a professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and the author of five books of fiction: Notable American Women (Vintage, 2002), The Father Costume (Artspace Books, 2002), The Age of Wire and String (Knopf, 1995), The Flame Alphabet (Knopf, 2012), and the forthcoming collection of short stories, Leaving the Sea (Knopf, 2014).

Notable American Women by Ben Marcus