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Ben Marcus returns with a collection of timely dystopian visions of alienation in a modern world. Here a hapless, corporate drone finds love after being disfigured from testing his employer´s newest nutrition supplement; a father starts to suspect that his son´s precocity has turned sinister; and two architects in a failing marriage must consider the ethics of artificially inciting emotion as they construct a memorial to a terrorist attack. It´s these characters and others that over the course of thirteen short stories showcase Marcus´s compassion, imagination, and mordant humor. Never has existential catastrophe been so much fun.

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"Engrossing, poetically surreal. . . . Woundingly funny."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Exceptional. . . . Each story is quietly eerie with electric characters."
-The Paris Review

"His best work. . . . Readers will find some of the most thrilling and disturbing literary fiction of the year in this collection."
-Financial Times

"Marcus´s writing is by turns extremely funny, affecting, and then disquieting, and as he moves seamlessly between these tones."
-Los Angeles Review of Books

"Spectacular. . . . Exhilarating."
-The Guardian

"One of Marcus´s strengths [is] imagining a future which is similar enough to our world to seem plausible, but different enough for the reader to grasp the ramifications of certain fates with which our current world is flirting."
-Vanity Fair

"Ruthless and hilarious."
-O, The Oprah Magazine

"The wilder and more Swiftian the plots get, the more intimately the stories seem to evoke a lived reality."
-Harper´s Magazine

"Notes from the Fog is an intense, vividly written book, filled with nightmarish scenarios and leavened by wit. Few writers possess Marcus´s agility with language or his controlled flights of imagination."
-Portland Press Herald

"Each story features moments of considered, lacerating prose threaded together by sentences that, like a marionette´s strings, bring the world to full, expansive life. This is a bracing, forceful collection."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

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Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction-The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea-and the editor of two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Granta, Harper´s Magazine, McSweeney´s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

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