Leaving the Sea
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.
Surreal and tender, terrifying and life-affirming, Leaving the Sea is the work of an utterly unique writer at the height of his powers.
"Ben Marcus is one of my favorite writers on the planet, and I am in awe of his latest collection. Marcus's fiction is unrivaled in its strangeness, beauty, and transformative power. A Marcus story is clinically proven to quadruple the vision of your inner eye, enlarge your heart ten sizes, and give you lucid dreams. In Leaving the Sea, Ben Marcus has collected fifteen wise, extraordinarily moving, funny and frightening tales. They spelunk into deep cave systems of love and treachery, dynamite new horizons of storytelling possibility. Nobody has the stylistic and imaginative range of Marcus."
— Karen Russell
"The protagonists in Marcus's new collection of disturbing and excruciatingly funny short stories are socially inappropriate, alienated from their lovers and relatives, anxious, bitter, mortified, lonely . . . The collection's later stories are more experimental in style and subject matter, but they, too, address themes of isolation and existential inquietude."
— The New Yorker
"Utterly compelling. . . As the book progresses Marcus tears up the rulebook completely. And it works beautifully . . . Outstanding."
— NPR
"Marcus has become a giant in the world of innovative, demanding prose. . . . Leaving the Sea is darkly funny, psychologically provocative, and playful."
— San Francisco Chronicle
"As we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if we're moving gradually through a dark chronology of America's imminent social and political unraveling . . . Marcus is nothing less than fully engaged in an artistic enterprise that the surrealists would have authorized: injecting into our recognizable world just enough weirdness to make readers second-guess their senses."
— Washington Post
"A bounty of Ben Marcus's surreal, heartrending stories, linguistic marvels all, gathers together in Leaving the Sea."
— Vanity Fair
"Brilliant, astute . . . Filled with Marcus's lovely, rhythmic sentences and wise insights about family, self, and masculinity."
— Boston Globe
"Marcus's re-imaginings of the conditions and lives of human beings in ways both radically different than other writers and uncomfortably close to some of our secret thoughts wakes the reader up, jolts the brain, and makes us see ourselves anew. . . . If you haven't yet read Marcus, Leaving the Sea is a magnificent, and magnificently discomfiting, place to start."
— The Oregonian
"Brilliant, unsettling . . . Unmatched in his imagining of the human form . . . Marcus articulates every grade of the uncanny, with masterful attention to the twisted vortices of language . . . Hilarious and ingenious."
— Booklist ★ Starred Review
"Exhilarating . . . A peculiar, funny, original analysis of the human psyche and modern language . . . A very strong collection."
— Publishers Weekly
"Mind-bending . . . Boundary-pushing . . . Marcus has mastered a bitterly comic tone and a level of psychological insight that make the characters more than repositories of middle-age rage . . . At once smart, claustrophobic, and comic."
— Kirkus
"Although the year is young, it's not a stretch to say that Ben Marcus's new collection, Leaving the Sea, may well be among the finest books of short fiction released in 2014."
— The Rumpus
"Marcus's whimsical and weird stories sometimes have the matter-of-fact, fairy-tale quality of Donald Barthelme's work, and sometimes have the renaming, redefining tactics of Kurt Vonnegut's."
— Minneapolis Star Tribune