The Age of Wire and String: Stories

A debut collection of short stories by the editor of Conjunctions draws on the familiar everyday world of food, the weather, shelter, and more, all radically altered in terms of their relationship to one another and the reader. A first collection.

In these 41 fictions (most are only a page or two), Marcus guides us through the postmodern wreckage of our homes and social customs. Deformed structures call for deformed expressions; using a form pioneered by Gertrude Stein, the book's eight sections pull the everyday ("Food"; "The House"; "Persons") through the looking-glass of language, coining new terms as necessary. The result is the combination of gorgeous, sensuous realism and disjointed action that has been coming together in the leading avant-garde journal Conjunctions, where Marcus is an editor. In these pages, which by turns read like a technical manual and like lyric poetry, one's wife and toaster can be connected on the same circuit, and "only the lawns feeding upward afford the angels an exit." Marcus's clear eye for the suburban sublime allows his definitions?of the structures and categories we impose on ourselves, of the people in his life and of hidden "natural" phenomena?to resonate in a way that is much richer than, say, Douglas Coupland's inventories of pop culture. The shockingly abstract terms Marcus uses to describe our intimate selves ("the condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually") mock our attempts to understand and explain away our bodies and the things that happen to them. This debut collection may just succeed in sneaking prose-poetry to a wider, younger audience.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

It's surreal, but not dada; fantastic, but not fantasy or sf; mysterious, but not a mystery; fiction, but almost totally lacking in characters, plot, or drama. It might be called "flash fiction" since most of the pieces are only a page or two, but unlike Barry Yourgrau's or Mark Amerika's "flashes," these are not complete unto themselves. The Age of Wire and String is a sort of metafictional parallel universe reconnecting elements of mass culture, personal experience, philosophy, law, and culture in obscure and mysterious ways. Over 40 snippets are categorized into sections on sleep, God, food, the house, animals, weather, persons, and society. Each section has its own glossary of terms, such as "CARL Name applied to food built from textiles, sticks, and rags. Implements used to aid ingestion are termed...the lens, the dial, the knob." This highly original work will appeal to ambitious readers who enjoy Joyce, Beckett, or other writers who confound our assumptions about language and perception. A potential cult classic; recommended for all medium to large academic and public libraries.
Jim Dwyer, California State Univ. Lib., Chico
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.