Leaving the Sea

Praise

“Exhilarating. . . . Thoroughly and perversely entertaining.” —New York Times Book Review  

“Marcus has become a giant in the world of innovative, demanding prose. . . . Leaving the Sea is darkly funny, psychologically provocative, and playful.”—San Francisco Chronicle 

“Utterly compelling. . . As the book progresses Marcus tears up the rulebook completely. And it works beautifully . . . . Outstanding.” —NPR  

“Marcus’s whimsical and weird stories sometimes have the matter-of-fact, fairy-tale quality of Donald Barthelme’s work, and sometimes have the renaming, redefining tactics of Kurt Vonnegut’s.”  —Minneapolis Star Tribune 

 “Brilliant, astute . . . Filled with Marcus’s lovely, rhythmic sentences and wise insights about family, self, and masculinity.”—Boston Globe 

“Marcus’s re-imaginings of the conditions and lives of human beings in ways both radically different than other writers and uncomfortably close to some of our secret thoughts wakes the reader up, jolts the brain, and makes us see ourselves anew. . . . If you haven’t yet read Marcus, Leaving the Sea is a magnificent, and magnificently discomfiting, place to start.”—The Oregonian  

“A bounty of Ben Marcus’s surreal, heartrending stories, linguistic marvels all, gathers together in Leaving the Sea.”—Vanity Fair 

 “The protagonists in Marcus’s new collection of disturbing and excruciatingly funny short stories are socially inappropriate, alienated from their lovers and relatives, anxious, bitter, mortified, lonely . . . The collection’s later stories are more experimental in style and subject matter, but they, too, address themes of isolation and existential inquietude.”—The New Yorker 
 
“The best stories in Leaving the Sea . . . seem powered by the electrostatic charge that results whenever the texture of the familiar is abraded by some alien, highly resistant material . . . As we make our way through this collection, we may feel as if we’re moving gradually through a dark chronology of America’s imminent social and political unraveling . . . Marcus is nothing less than fully engaged in an artistic enterprise that the surrealists would have authorized: injecting into our recognizable world just enough weirdness to make readers second-guess their senses.” —Washington Post
 
“A wide-ranging meditation on parenthood, relationships, language, and the end of the world . . . Regardless of idiom, Marcus tackles deep-held, universal terrors and anxieties in his singular way.” —Time Out New York 

“Although the year is young, it’s not a stretch to say that Ben Marcus’s new collection, Leaving the Sea, may well be among the finest books of short fiction released in 2014.”—The Rumpus

“Powerful and poignant . . . Exceptionally intelligent . . . A collection of short stories of extraordinary technical agility and control . . . that showcases work from all stages of Marcus’s writing career . . . The language in all of these stories is acute and exacting; details of observation are haunting and revelatory.” —The National 

“There is a loquacious energy and inventiveness at work and at play in these stories that carries things along even when we travel to what one character admits is a place ‘deeply outside any likely reality.’”  —The Toronto Star

“Unnerving . . . Brilliant . . . Exhilarating . . . Marcus’s characters will live on after the final page is turned and the book is back on the shelf . . . There’s no denying the man’s talent. The stories in Leaving the Sea are the perfect showcase for his range and innovation. They are thoughtful, challenging, even frustrating, but the rewards are there for those willing to put in the effort.” —Lit Reactor
 
“It’s in moments of sharp discomfort that Marcus thrives; these are, above all, tales about characters on the edge . . . It’s a recurring theme in Leaving the Sea that violently destructive forces lurk both inside and out.”—The Daily Beast, “Hot Reads”

“When Ben Marcus issues a collection of stories, the literary world quakes. This latest collection shows why the imaginative Marcus’s uncompromising style has earned him such respect.”—Flavorwire