All Kinds of Worlds

By Jordan E. Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted October 15, 2004.

Every generation has its defining breed of writer. The twenties had the French-inspired literary salons, the fifties had the rebellious beats. Now, we have an edgy 30-something crowd delivering fiction that screams "we dare you to pin us down" and includes in its minions McSweeney's poster child Dave Eggers, and the multi-faceted Ben Marcus – educated in philosophy and literature at New York and Brown Universities.

This new breed of writer tends to use fiction to explore the pathos and myths of American life. Marcus claims to have grown up in the Midwest, Europe, New York and Texas, which could account for a literary aesthetic that has been described as both "twisted" and "genius" and compared to the divergent likes of Samuel Beckett and George Orwell. He is a former senior editor for Conjunctions literary magazine, known for its experimental fiction, the author of the novels "The Age of Wire and String" (Knopf) and "Notable American Women" (Vintage) and most recently the editor of "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories" featuring a range of writers including Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, George Saunders and more.

His work is both familiar and surreal and has earned him a dedicated, if cult-like, following.

Jordan Rosenfeld: What were you looking for when you began collecting the authors for "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories"?

Ben Marcus: I wanted each story to be really different stylistically and for this to be a source book of short fiction that showed the range and variety of the kinds of stories that are being written today. I didn't want to have only realist fiction, or just lyrical or meta-fictional or minimalist fiction. With some anthologies that I've read in the past, even with some I've really loved, I've tended to find that those anthologies reinforced a single way to write a short story. When I teach I've always ended up making these course packs of Xeroxed stories from different kinds of writers and giving them to students as an inspirational model to show that originality is still possible. That was my operating principle for this book.

In order to collect these stories into an anthology, you must have had some kind of aesthetic at work that allowed you to look at a story and recognize its merit. What did you look for?

Some old fashioned standards still applied. I wanted it to be memorable, to transport me, to consume me, devour me and completely engage and fascinate me, as well as trouble and confuse me. I wanted to be overcome by stories in different kinds of ways. The aesthetic was attempting to allow as many kinds of aesthetics and sub-aesthetics as I could find. I wanted to pick the kinds of stories I thought I might not normally like. That was interesting to me because I deliberately read all kinds of writers I hadn't read because maybe I had felt they weren't for me. I tried very hard to read into all kinds of worlds. I kept proving myself wrong and finding ones that I did like.

Can you think of an example where you were really surprised by a writer's work?

It's embarrassing to admit now – because they all look like such beautiful stuff now – that I can't really recall why I might not have thought I'd like them. For instance the Deborah Eisenberg story in this collection which is now one of my favorites, called "Someone to Talk To" is just a devastating story. It's intimate and fierce, and terrible, terrible things happen on the interior of these characters. I had stereotyped it 100 percent incorrectly based on god knows what. I hate to admit that. I'm glad I was able to knock down a few prejudices I had.

I wonder if you can address the word "new" in the title. Is it intended to mean that these stories are doing something new and different?

That's a good question. New could just mean it had to have been written today, and it's a slower timeline in literature, so if it's been written in the last 15 years we could call it new. I was using it more temporally rather than that these are all new kinds of styles, because I think, as I say in my introduction, quite a few of these styles are an extension of literary styles of the past. That's an ongoing conversation that writers have with each other. That's what a tradition is, to absorb the work from the past and engage it and make your own version of it and maybe modify or supplement or subvert it in some way. I guess I'm not a real believer that there are all the sudden a bunch of new styles; I think there are tiny gradual shifts that go on all the time.

Jordan E. Rosenfeld is a freelance writer living in Northern California and the host of Word by Word: Conversations with Writers, on KRCB Radio.

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