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Title: The Age of Wire and String: Stories (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) by Ben Marcus ISBN: 1-56478-196-8 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Not stories, not a novel: a Book!
Comment: This book is beyond description.I can tell you that the author is doing things with (or to) the English language that have never been done before at such a length. Little things, like using articles before personal names, using the syntax of descriptive anthropology to hang this new diction on, and big things like capital-I imagination. The result is like nothing else (if there is something comparable, I'd like to know and read it, too). It's definitely not "stories". And most people wouldn't like to call it a novel, either. It's a book. Its cumulative effects are stunning. The author has completely conceived a world out of sticks, burlap, mud, feathers, and human emotion. It feels real.We can be grateful to Dalkey Archive Press for publishing this book: most publishers probably wouldn't have touched it because the folks in marketing would have apoplectic fits trying to fit this into marketing categories.A must read, especially for readers otherwise bored with the contemporary novel.
Rating: 5
Summary: One of my favorite books
Comment: Novel in every sense of the word, "The age of Wire and String" is a work that transcends the label of "experimental fiction". While the book is difficult, and at times frustrating in its redistribution of physics, it is a work of unerring discipline in that it maintains, comments upon and eloquently captures its own internal logic. With all the elegance of an anthropology textbook, and all of the emotion of an instruction manual, Marcus' prose somehow manages to be poignant and insightful. The book is autobiographical in only the most ghostly of ways; Marcus and members of his family emerge as pieces of the earth, ancient tools, scriptures and units that serve rudimentary functions in every day life. For anyone who loves physics and literature, reading this book is a necessity. Marcus, I believe, is one of the most talented of our contemporary writers,and this is a book that could benefit from academic scrutiny in classes of literature, physics, or anthropology. The term "avant-guarde" is meant to refer to people who are ahead of their time, and not merely eccentric or subversive, and Ben Marcus is one of the few writers who writes with enough clarity, precision, and exactitude to be genuinely accredited with that title. This book is so precise in its ruminations on an alternative and sometimes baffling set of physics that it greatly elucidates our own world in comparison, which is supposedly the ultimate goal of literature. Oh, and did I mention how fiercely witty Ben Marcus is? This was a joy to read.
Rating: 3
Summary: Book review
Comment: My father gave me this book for Xmas. He had to buy it special order through a large, L.A.-based bookstore.
This book, to me, feels very right for the time and the place. That place is my world, and that time is probably the near future.
The task of literature often seems to be similarity. For example, the form of this review is in a general review form. I think of the book, and place it as the subject of my sentences. There are no indirect subjects.
The Age of Wire and String is one of my favorite titles, and perhaps it does something for the aesthetic of an age, which could be ours. I treasure this book for what it represents to me; and that is why I've given it to a friend, who at first demured, saying he was not intelligent enough to understand it. Some people are strange; I don't know what their deal is.
My suggestion would be to look into the author and read some excerpts, find out from some other readers/talkers you respect what they might suggest. Or splurge. I hope for no buyer's remorse.
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Title: Stories in the Worst Way by Gary Lutz ISBN: 097094280X Publisher: 3rd Bed Pub. Date: 01 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Notable American Women: A Novel by Ben Marcus ISBN: 0375713786 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 15 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $12.50 |
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Title: The Father Costume by Ben Marcus, Matthew Ritchie ISBN: 1891273035 Publisher: Artspace Books Pub. Date: 15 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella by George Saunders ISBN: 1573225797 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 1997 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Pastoralia: Stories by George Saunders ISBN: 1573228729 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: 12 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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