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Rating: 
Summary: Some weird stuff
Review: Ben Marcus is a young, beautiful god. What more of a review do you want?
Rating: 
Summary: elitist
Review: Britney Spears is tremendously popular right now, and Michael Jackson was tremendously popular years ago, and etc.... Musicians who take music more seriously are not, and have rarely been, popular. The music these artists make is almost always considered by the general public to have "failed" to provide the proper level of "entertainment." Ben Marcus' book is not for you if your relationship to books and to language is the ordinary relationship-- that is, if you have not cultivated, for whatever reasons, a more intense concern with the truth of being (i.e. the truth of language). This book is only for very powerful people, and for these, it is a godsend.
Rating:
Summary: A Structural Rarity
Review: I cherish this book. I bought it a long time ago, when it was a Knopf hardcover, from a little bookstore now defunct. Structurally this is one of the few books that has attempted this format. I mean, this isn't quite a novel, not quite stories. In a sense, this book could be read in any direction, front to back, middle towards the outsides, etc. It has a hypertextual feel, to use a fancy word. I'm really enthusiastic about structure. I'm always thrilled when a book comes out that seems to share my enthusiasm.
Not many books have done this well. Robert Coover's short story The Babysitter is a common example, mainly because it is such a great story.
Julio Cortazar's novel Hopscotch develops a similar structure: There are three or four different orders in which to read the chapters. It is a sad story of two lovers.
James Kelman's newest novel, the powerful book Translated Accounts is another example of this structure. What makes Ben Marcus's book so unique besides this shared, rare structure, is the sudden, jarring ways in which he uses language. Everything is folded and shorn, each word teeting on the edge of nonsense, like the lyrical antics of Dr Seuss. There is a creeping sense of autobiography behind Age of Wire & String that I have heard will be further explored in his next novel Notable American Woman, due out in January, I think. The cover is to be designed by the same guy who did the redesigns of Rick Moody's books, so I suspect it'll be a spanking good-looking book.
Rating: 
Summary: the next beckett stein big thing writer of the new century
Review: Like those other young cult leaders John D'Agata and David Wallace (before his popularity at least), Marcus exhibits a rare talent that actually allows him to get away with some of the absurd flights that his formal inventions take. Nothing in his generation of fiction comes close to this aching collection of longing.
Rating:
Summary: Book review
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Book review
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: the next beckett stein big thing writer of the new century
Review: My friend emailed me this: "I saw him (Ben Marcus) read and he was silly...he's won lots of writing awards and is touted as the next beckett stein big thing writer of the
new century" So, of course I'm reading wire and string. He, Mr. Marcus, seems to have come up with something similar to Beckett, a bizarre insane intelligence. For example, I have no idea what the stories mean, because they don't mean anything to me, but there is some underlying structure that makes sense, and in fact, is new. It reminds me of deja vu or of something being on the tip of one's tongue. Part of the brain gets it, but the other part, the part that needs to bring it into conciousness is lost. It's almost painful, like trying to make out a figure in the dark is almost painful. Ben Marcus reminds me of the actor from American Pie, the dapper suit-wearing one. I mean he looks like him; are they the same person?
Rating:
Summary: One of my favorite books
Review: 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:
Summary: Makes Me Think of
Review: 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:
Summary: Defining Genres
Review: This is another book I discovered last semester in a "Border Genre" course. It's categorized as "stories" but I think they are more like philosophy. An excellent book! Ben Marcus also has another book I haven't read but I probably will.
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