Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus (born October 11th, 1967) is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including "Harper's", "The New Yorker", "The Paris Review", "Granta", "The New York Times", "GQ", "Salon", "McSweeney's", "Time", and "Conjunctions". He is also the fiction editor of "The American Reader". His latest book, "Notes From The Fog: Stories", was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.
Life.
Marcus grew up in Austin, the son of a retired mathematician and the literary critic and Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University and an MFA from Brown University. His father is Jewish and his mother is of Irish Catholic background; Marcus had a Bar Mitzvah. Marcus also has two kids, Delia and Solomon, born in 2004 and 2008.
Marcus is a Professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, and he lives in New York City. He is married to the writer Heidi Julavits. He is the editor of "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories", and the fiction editor at "The American Reader". For several years he was the fiction editor of "Fence".
Influences.
Marcus' influences include Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Donald Barthelme, Richard Yates, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Padgett Powell, J. M. Coetzee, Kōbō Abe, Gary Lutz, and George Saunders.