Ben Marcus

GOD-BURNING SYSTEM: Method of Thompsonian self-immolation. For each Thompson, there exist flammable outcrops or limbs which rub onto the larger body of Thompson (Perkins), rendering morning fires and emberage that lights the sky and advances the time of a given society or culture.

Ben Marcus was born in Chicago in 1967. He grew up in the Midwest and in Europe, New York and Texas. His undergraduate degree was earned in philosophy at New York University. He received an M.F.A. from Brown University, and has since taught writing in New York, Texas, Virginia and Rhode Island. He is a former senior editor of the literary journal Conjunctions, and edited a portfolio of new fiction for the Spring 1996 issue, "Sticks and Stones." His first book, The Age of Wire and String, was published in 1995 by Alfred A. Knopf. It will appear shortly in Great Britain from Flamingo, and in paperback in America from Dalkey Archive Press.

Short fiction of his has appeared in Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Mississippi Review, The Quarterly, Conjunctions, and Story Quarterly, and he reviews literature for The Village Voice. Presently Ben lives in Providence, where he is a lecturer in creative writing at Brown University.