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Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

Ben Marcus

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Ben Marcus
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: October 11
Author
Novelist
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Wind
Permission
Written
Author
Face
Shut
Faces
Weather
May
Express
Copyrighted
Book
Turned
Slamming
Without
Pages
Deployed
Produce
Produces

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When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to realise that my writing is very autobiographical at the emotional level.
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In certain strains of Judaism, there's a profound passion for the ineffable. Contemplation of God is meant to be forever elusive, because, you know, our tiny minds can't possibly comprehend Him. If we find ourselves comprehending Him, then we can be sure we're off track.
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Fiction is too complicated and too elusive to break down into a set of tricks.
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My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.
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Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.
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I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.
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Mostly we're motivated to control ourselves in public. Mostly. At home the motivation is much less clear. At home there's a bit of a lab for bad behavior. You can test things out without terrible consequences. Or maybe the consequences are there, but they are deferred, buried, much harder to detect.
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Suspense left my life a long time ago, now it has returned. I do not care for it.
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Without sound, celebration and grief look nearly the same.
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Among other things, autoimmune disorders are an induction into a world of unstable information and no reliable expertise.
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It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little accountability.
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My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives.
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I always, at least back then, struggled with emotion in writing. I felt like I could do odd, unusual things, but there wouldn't be enough feeling in them, and maybe if there's a progression at all to anything that I've done it's that I've always wanted to have a high - an almost overwhelming - degree of feeling in what I write.
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I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.
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Being with him was like being alone underwater - everything was slow nothing counted I could not be harmed I would feel dry and cold when I resurfaced.
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My goal, with whatever I'm working on, is to lose track of time.
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A self needed to spill out sometimes, a body should show evidence of what the hell went on inside it.
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I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do.
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To refrain from storytelling is perhaps one of the highest forms of respect we can pay. Those people, with no stories to circle them, can die without being misunderstood.
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Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of complexity, its admission of unknowability.
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