I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard.

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• Ben Marcus:

  I love the way dates in a text make us think that truth will follow.

• Ben Marcus:

  It amazes me that parents are allowed to raise kids. There's so much power and often very little ac

• Ben Marcus:

  When I started writing at 18 or 19, I had a fear of anything autobiographical, but I've come to rea

• Ben Marcus:

  Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children.

• Ben Marcus:

  I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a wri

• Ben Marcus:

  I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the

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• Ben Marcus:

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• Ben Marcus:

  My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all.

• Ben Marcus:

  Judaism to me, as badly as I practiced it, what I've always loved about it was its total embrace of