Vintage Contemporaries / Notes from the Fog

Excerpted from "Blueprints for St. Louis"


It was winter, which meant that a pelvic frost had fallen across the land. Or maybe just across Roy and Helen s apartment. And, in truth, the frost had long since matured into a kind of bodily aloofness, just shy of visible flinching when they passed each other in the halls, or when they co-slept in the intimacy-free bed they d splurged on. Why not have the best sleep of your life next to the dried-out sack of daddy you ve long taken for granted, whose wand no longer glows and quivers for you and for whom you no longer quietly melt? You had to track the erotic cooling back into summer, or the prior spring, and, well, didn t the seasons and the years just dog-pile one another when you tried to solve math like that?

Helen wasn t particularly concerned, because, whatever, there was a clarity to the coldness, right? And screw Roy if he d fallen down a brightly-colored porn hole, pummeling himself to images of animated youngsters slithering around nude, in grownup crotch, gear in a cartoon fairyland. Internet histories weren t her favorite literary genre, but she knew how to read them. Anyway, if her husband s use-case viability on the marital graph had taken a nose-dive, then so, too, had her own burden. She had her friends, she had her work on the memorial, and she had the shower head. When she and Roy first got married, whenever ago, Helen s mother had told her that, if people don t visit, you don t have to host. Period, full stop. And even though Helen s take on this advice now was off-label, it applied just fine to her touchless union. The body unloved, the body unhandled and unseen. The body as a ghost in training for whatever soiled world came next. Anyway, wasn t left-alone the best place to wind up?

Maybe old age and the cold blue death of the groin would solve that. Maybe Helen would inherit a sweet and useless Roy, post-pornography, sitting politely behind a drool cloth, swaddled in food-stained

Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea and the editor of two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and New American Stories. His fiction has appeared in Bomb, Granta, Harper s Magazine, McSweeney s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

Engrossing, poetically surreal. . . . Woundingly funny.
The New York Times Book Review

Exceptional. . . . Each story is quietly eerie with electric characters.
The Paris Review

His best work. . . . Readers will find some of the most thrilling and disturbing literary fiction of the year in this collection.
Financial Times

Marcus s writing is by turns extremely funny, affecting, and then disquieting, and as he moves seamlessly between these tones.
Los Angeles Review of Books

Spectacular. . . . Exhilarating.
The Guardian

One of Marcus s strengths [is] imagining a future which is similar enough to our world to seem plausible, but different enough for the reader to grasp the ramifications of certain fates with which our current world is flirting.
Vanity Fair

Ruthless and hilarious.
O, The Oprah Magazine

The wilder and more Swiftian the plots get, the more intimately the stories seem to evoke a lived reality.
Harper s Magazine

Notes from the Fog is an intense, vividly written book, filled with nightmarish scenarios and leavened by wit. Few writers possess Marcus s agility with language or his controlled flights of imagination.
Portland Press Herald

Each story features moments of considered, lacerating prose threaded together by sentences that, like a marionette s strings, bring the world to full, expansive life. This is a bracing, forceful collection.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)