Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus (born October 11, 1967) is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written five books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

Life Marcus grew up in Austin, the son of a retired mathematician and the literary critic and Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus. His father is Jewish and his mother is of Irish Catholic background; Marcus had a Bar Mitzvah.

Marcus received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University and an MFA from Brown University.

Marcus is a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and the fiction editor at The American Reader. For several years he was the fiction editor of Fence.

Marcus is married to the writer Heidi Julavits, with whom he has two children. They live in New York City and also have a seasonal house in Maine.

Influences Marcus's influences include Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Padgett Powell, J. M. Coetzee, David Ohle, Kōbō Abe, Garielle Lutz, and George Saunders.

Awards and honours 1999 Whiting Award 2000 National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship in Fiction 2008 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2009 Creative Capital Award for Innovative Literature 2013 Berlin Prize Fellowship 2013 Guggenheim Fellow 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award shortlist Leaving the Sea 2014 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize, shortlist, The Flame Alphabet