The Age of Wire and String: Stories

First Dalkey Archive edition, 1998. Bright, clean & tight copy, unread, in As New condition. "In THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING, hailed by Robert Coover as 'the most audacious literary debut in decades,' 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." [publisher copy] "This doesn't happen very often. Somebody comes out of left field and blows up literature. In the authoritative tone of the product manual, Ben Marcus describes the operation of an impossible world that, page by page, becomes increasingly plausible and affecting. With the danger of using the degraded language to which this book is the antidote, I'd say THE AGE OF WIRE AND STRING marks the debut of a highly intelligent and exacting literary mind."--Jeffrey Eugenides. "A rare, genius-struck achievement filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows."--Kirkus Reviews. Pristine paperback w/brilliant corners & crisp edges, a square & tight binding w/no creases in spine. Quite presentable. …