Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His new novel, The Flame Alphabet, will be published by Knopf in January 2012. Marcus has published stories, essays, and reviews in numerous publications, including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, Conjunctions, Grand Street, and Tin House. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence.

He is a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation. In 2008 he received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he has also received a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and a fiction fellowship from the Howard Foundation of Brown University. Since 2000 he has been on the faculty at Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he is an associate professor.