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A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of
children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from
strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam
and Claire need to do is look around the neighbourhood: In the
park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their
children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful
escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.
With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival
is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents'
sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be
susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it
isn't so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they
waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their
departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to
find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a
world beyond recognition. The Flame Alphabet invites the question:
what is left of civilization when we lose the ability to
communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly
entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving,
this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus's position in the
first rank of American novelists.
Surfing has inspired fantastic and colorful graphic designs to
advertise surfboards, surf shops, wax, wetsuits, magazines..., even
skateboards and snowboards. Here are more than 1,250 to challenge
collectors, inspire artists, and charm the surfing crowd. Written
by a veteran enthusiast who knows his way around the surfing world,
this exhibit-in-a-book, from many private collections and
institutions, is the most comprehensive surf show ever attempted.
Here are stickers, patches, and decals from before 1920 until
today, documenting the history of surfing worldwide and providing
classic and original designs of great beauty and style. The
big-name surfboard makers are here, and the shops, organizations,
and beaches are represented, from Hawaii to Mexico to Florida.
Surfing movies, plastered cars, lifeguard stands, and icons who
popularized the sport, from Duke Kahanamoku (1920s), to Greg Noll
(1960s), to California Girls (always). Be startled with the
creativity these designs show and enjoy them. Surfing has had a
dynamic influence on modern life, and it is all captured here in
its graphics.
'I wake up and I have to make the right choice,' he said.
Master-stylist Ben Marcus returns with a wonder-cabinet of
brain-rearranging stories. From the horrifyingly strange to the
deeply touching, each story is a literary masterclass unlikely to
leave the reader unchanged.
From parent/child relationships thrown
agonisingly off kilter, to intensely moving scenarios of dependence
and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific
frontiers, Ben Marcus is the great chronicler of the contemporary
uncanny and the peculiar future.
Piece by piece, he takes us apart.
The short story is a barometer for the state and shape of
literature. New American Stories presents the boldest, most
innovative and most resonant fiction coming out of the American
literary scene. Ben Marcus, author of The Flame Alphabet and
Leaving the Sea, has here curated an anthology that gives the lay
of the literary land. From established masters of the form like Don
DeLillo and Lydia Davis to neoteric trailblazers such as Rebecca
Curtis and Rachel B. Glaser, this collection sees Marcus trying to
'prove that the distinctions we erect between styles and approaches
to fiction can be essentially meaningless'. The result is a
must-read, must-own volume for readers of literary fiction.
A bold new short story collection from one of the most exhilarating
and innovative writers of our time. The stories in Leaving the Sea
take place in a world which is a distortion of our own, where
strange illnesses strike at random and where people disappear
without a trace. Ben Marcus has created a labyrinth populated by
disturbed, weary men; from the frustrated creative writing teacher
to the advocate of self-inhumation; from Paul, whose return home
leads him further into his isolation, or Mather, whose child is
sick, to an unnamed narrator who spends his lonely evenings
calculating the probabilities of his mother's imminent demise.
Dark, funny and utterly unique, Leaving the Sea showcases a writer
at the height of his powers.
In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus welds together a new
reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses,
automobiles and the weather are some of the recycled elements in
Marcus's first collection - part fiction, part handbook - as
familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually,
this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and
language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus
produces new feelings and sensations - both comic and disturbing -
in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane
of existence.
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Hello America (Paperback)
J.G. Ballard; Introduction by Ben Marcus
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R279
R250
Discovery Miles 2 500
Save R29 (10%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A terrifying vision of the future from one of the twentieth
century's most renowned writers - J. G. Ballard, author of 'Empire
of the Sun' and 'Crash'. Following the energy crisis of the late
twentieth-century America has been abandoned. Now, a century later,
an expedition from Europe returns to the deserted continent. But
America is unrecognisable - the Bering Strait has been dammed and
the whole continent has become a desert, populated by isolated
natives and the bizarre remnants of a disintegrated culture. The
expedition sets off from Manhattan on a cross-continent journey,
through Holiday Inns and abandoned theme parks. They will uncover a
shocking new power in the heart of Las Vegas in this unique vision
of our world transformed. This edition is part of a new
commemorative series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions
from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith,
Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
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Malibu (Hardcover)
Ben Marcus, Marc Wanamaker
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R842
R691
Discovery Miles 6 910
Save R151 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality.
On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.
This striking, oversized book, designed to evoke encyclopedias, is
a highly creative amalgam of collage with a political bent and
poetry. From 2011 to 2012, American artist Mel Chin (b. 1951)
extracted all of the images from a twenty-five-volume set of Funk
& Wagnall's Universal Standard Encyclopedia (ca. 1953-56) and
began visually re-editing. Thousands of images rendered by
photomechanical reproduction that served a populist, mid-century
encyclopedia are reconfigured with 21st-century hindsight and
idiosyncratic connections that convey social and artistic
commentaries. Surrealism, humor, sarcasm, politics, history, and
beauty permeate these sometimes raucous, often confounding, but
consistently stunning images. Over 500 black-and-white collages are
accompanied by twenty-five poems, one per encyclopedia volume,
commissioned by Chin and author Nick Flynn specifically for this
publication. Writers range from the well-known to the surprising.
The Funk & Wag from A to Z offers mischievous fun with pointed
commentary and hilarity. Distributed for The Menil Collection
From one of the most innovative and vital writers of his
generation, an extraordinary collection of stories that showcases
his gifts--and his range--as never before.
In the hilarious, lacerating "I Can Say Many Nice Things," a
washed-up writer toying with infidelity leads a creative writing
workshop on board a cruise ship. In the dystopian "Rollingwood," a
divorced father struggles to take care of his ill infant, as his
ex-wife and colleagues try to render him irrelevant. In "Watching
Mysteries with My Mother," a son meditates on his mother's
mortality, hoping to stave off her death for as long as he sits by
her side. And in the title story, told in a single breathtaking
sentence, we watch as the narrator's marriage and his sanity
unravel, drawing him to the brink of suicide.
As the collection progresses, we move from more traditional
narratives into the experimental work that has made Ben Marcus a
groundbreaking master of the short form. In these otherworldly
landscapes, characters resort to extreme survival strategies to
navigate the terrors of adulthood, one opting to live in a
lightless cave and another methodically setting out to recover
total childhood innocence; an automaton discovers love and has to
reinvent language to accommodate it; filial loyalty is seen as a
dangerous weakness that must be drilled away; and the distance from
a cubicle to the office coffee cart is refigured as an existential
wasteland, requiring heroic effort.
In these piercing, brilliantly observed investigations into human
vulnerability and failure, it is often the most absurd and alien
predicaments that capture the deepest truths. Surreal and tender,
terrifying and life-affirming, "Leaving the Sea" is the work of an
utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
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