Leaving the Sea - Softcover

Ben Marcus

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847086365 ISBN 13: 9781847086365

Publisher: Granta, 2015

Synopsis

Leaving the Sea

About this title

Review:

'A new short-story collection set in a distorted world where disease strikes at random and people disappear without trace. From the author of the dazzlingly original The Flame Alphabet and The Age of Wire and String.' --'Books of 2014', Guardian

'Exhilarating and also at times hilarious... Thoroughly and perversely entertaining' -- New York Times

'As the collection progresses, things get weirder... The stories are dystopic, nightmarish, Kafkaesque in their refusal to explain their own distortions. The writing is so sharp, the world seems made afresh with every story' --Emma Brockes, Guardian

'One of the most innovative writers of the concise form around. Leaving the Sea is a fascinating showcase of Marcus' stylistic range, though the stories are all linked by a heady mix of dystopia, absurdity and detached male protagonists. Marcus balances out the darker, more intense moments with well-placed comic lines. It's an absorbing collection, and marks out the author as an eclectic and valuable talent' --The List

'Relentlessly sardonic, cynical and ambitiously experimental in style... Leaving the Sea makes you want to tell everyone you know to go and read Ben Marcus' --Financial Times

'Marcus is adept at putting his darker subject matter into relief with bright sparks of humour. Leaving the Sea left me sucker punched' --Observer

'Leaving the Sea has plenty of the chair-gripping alienation that marks his previous books, but there's a greater emotional complexity. Thoroughly and perversely entertaining' --Scotsman

'Ben Marcus is one of the most stunningly original and profoundly unsettling writers of his generation' --Stuart Kelly, Guardian

'Intriguing... full of deft, dark humour' --Times Literary Supplement

'The prose I lethal, dissecting, surprising, oblique... This is writing that pushes to the edge, where it's bleak and awful and darkly funny' ***** --Skinny

'Leaving the Sea is one of the most interesting books I've read this year, not just for its content but also for what it tells us about the author's body of work and his progress as a writer' --John Self, Asylum blog

'Darkly humorous and linguistically adventurous' --'Top Summer Reads', Financial Times

'Marcus's propulsive, crystalline sentences pull us in. The world looks different once you put Leaving the Sea down - testament to the infective power of its vision' --Literary Review

'A typically mind-expanding collection from America's most fascinating experimentalist, full of strange new insights and brilliantly dislocated language' --'Books of the Year', Daily Telegraph

'He's funny but there's always something around the next corner to make you catch your breath. Always original, and frequently surprising, these stories are the fruits of a fertile and unique imagination' --Paperback review, Herald

'Marcus's vision is a distinctive one and his ability to twist sentences into bizarre and wonderful shapes - along with his unsettlingly persuasive sense of absurdity - gives these stories a strange power' --Paperback review, Irish Times

'The way Ben Marcus ekes out the facts and emotions is exquisite. Marcus writes with rare economy. He's a master' **** --Paperback review, Scotsman

About the Author:

BEN MARCUS was born in Chicago in 1967. The son of a mathematician and a literary scholar, he was raised in the Midwest, Austin, London, Aarhus, and New York. He holds degrees from New York University and Brown University, and is on the faculty at Columbia University in New York. His writing has been published in Granta, the New Yorker, Harper's, the Paris Review, and the New York Times. He is the author of Notable American Women, The Age of Wire and String and The Flame Alphabet.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1847086365
• ISBN 13: 9781847086365
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288