Ben Marcus

Fiction becomes a place where I face certain fears such as losing language or losing my children. ”

My first book, 'The Age of Wire and String,' came out in 1995, and it was hardly reviewed at all. ”

I like big doses of grief when I read: Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Kenzabaro Oe, Thomas Bernhard. ”

I'm an enormous fan of Thomas Bernhard's books, and I like the relentless feeling in his work - the pursuit of darkness, the negative - and I think in some sense I've internalised that as what one is supposed to do. ”

The common, the quotidian, is so much more unyielding to me, really stubborn and hard to work with, and I like this because it makes me think and it makes me worry. I can't just plunge my hand into the meat of it. I need new approaches. ”

I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids. ”

My parents showed me by example that they could balance their work and family lives. ”