Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Ben Marcus, author of Notes From The Fog, his collection of short stories published August 27th by Knopf.

When last we heard from Ben we were talking about his novel The Flame Alphabet, a book that in some ways, in my opinion, shares many of the characteristics as do some of these stories.

As you may recall, Ben is the author of several books. As I mentioned The Flame Alphabet, The Age of Wire and String, Leaving The Sea and Notable American Women. His writing has appeared in Harpers, The New Yorker, the NYT and many other prestigious publications. He is the editor of New American Stories. He’a won three Pushcart Prizes. He’s a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a member of the Faculty of Columbia since 2000. Ok, that’s enough I guess.
Notes from the Fog is a collection of stories about lots of people, all interesting and most of them sad or lost.

A little boy who isn’t what he is supposed to be. And parents who are sad and angry that he turns into a child that they never expected .

A man whose life is completely and utterly ruined by a corporate experiment grow horribly wrong. A lot of money involved. In fact a lot of money involved in many of the stories.

A husband and wife architectural team whose marriage is not what it should be and whose designs reflect that to a certain extent. And also from where the title of this collection arises.

A mother who then becomes the mother of her sister’s orphaned boys and in the meantime establishes an unusual relationship with those boys’ parents, revolving around a series of 200 dollar payments.

A pill that will make you happy or not, but that just won’t stay down.

And many others with equally troubling, sometimes distressing premises that lead to a feeling that you’ve just read something that might change your life or then again might not.