The Age of Wire and String

BEN MARCUS is the author of Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age of Wire and String and The Flame Alphabet. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Times, and McSweeney's. Marcus has received a Whiting Writer's Award, a NEA Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is an associate professor at Columbia University. CATRIN MORGAN studied illustration at the Royal College of Art. Since graduating she has exhibited her work internationally and is one of the author illustrators of Phantom Settlements. She teaches on the MA Illustration Authorial Practice at Falmouth University and BA Illustration at Norwich University College of the Arts.

The most audacious literary debut in decades - witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing - Robert CooverTransfixing... an extraordinary debut... A treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature. Multiple readings are rewarding - Steven Poole, Times Literary SupplementFrequently touching and funny... a cross between a scientific manual, Monty Python and a kind of Bible, with a surreal and opaque logic of its own - Christina Patterson, ObserverUtterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful... all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home - Donald AntrimThis novel has a place within the chaotic tradition of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. [If] novels are to reflect the complexities of the modern world, they must take on some of its messy characteristics... Intelligent and good-humoured - Andrew Biswell, Daily TelegraphThe Age of Wire and String evades classification, persisting in your mind because of its psychotically ardent prose... It uses words as they once were, as incantations, as spells to summon up the contorted beings of the imagination - Matthew De Abaitua, The IdlerFragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments - written in some of the most breathtaking prose I've encountered lately - Rick Moody