Ben Marcus
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Writer, and Professor, Columbia University

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction - Class of Fall 2013

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). His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, New Yorker, Paris Review, The Believer, New York Times, McSweeney’s, and other publications. Marcus is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and serves as the fiction editor for The American Reader. Marcus studied philosophy at New York University (BA, 1989) and fiction writing at Brown University (MFA, 1991). 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.

Project Description

Untitled Novel

During his time at the American Academy, Marcus worked on a new novel “about surveillance and the family,” he writes. “It concerns the pain of being known, the sorrow of being misunderstood. It is about subterfuge and false identities, emotional fraudulence, and the kinds of guilt peculiar to families. It is also about authority, the persuasion we create with language, the control we can exert through words. I’m drawn to the intense dynamics within families, the ferocious, primal notion of a bloodline. It is hard to overlook the potential for savagery that arises. Family is frequently invoked in public discourse. It saves and protects us, nurtures and comforts us. It is unquestionably virtuous, something we are all meant to want to keep intact, and as much as I am deeply rooted to my own family, this unassailable social structure is something I’d like to press on in fiction, to test, through narrative, in the most complex way that I can.”

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