The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
Anyone looking for a reliable, current grasp of the everyday phenomena of life and willing to accept that anything utterable can also be true will find this to be a valuable resource. The Age of Wire and String is an amazing debut that combines humour with ferocious creativity.
The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus
17 used from $4.01
Amazon.com
It is a collection of brief stories, typically no more than two pages, that describe a bizarre universe that is astonishingly similar to our own while still being strangely alien. The explanations of all the new terminology are provided in a dictionary that follows the majority of the stories, albeit they are just as bizarre as the stories themselves. Drawings and images, mostly of fictitious objects, are mingled with it. Strange is the word, yet it’s so inexpensive on Kindle that you should buy it just to take a look.
Systems of knowledge are created by Age of Wire and String that strive for absurdity. And because Marcus frequently employs structure without content that we can easily identify, even though it has emotional resonances (he uses a lot of family vocabulary), he is enabling a leap of imagination between the text and the reader—not an invitation to make some kind of direct sense of it, but to make it work in some way for us. The Age of Wire and String is a fantastic piece that is often incredibly ingenious, perplexing, and gratifying.
