Ben Marcus is the author of four books of fiction: Notable American Women, The Father Costume, The Age of Wire and String, and The Flame Alphabet. His collection of stories, Leaving the Sea, was published by Knopf in January 2014. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, The Believer, The New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, Time, Conjunctions, and elsewhere. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and for several years he was the fiction editor of Fence. He is now the fiction editor at The American Reader. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award, a Creative Capital Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and three Pushcart Prizes. He is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, and was a fall 2013 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He taught at Brown University for several years before joining the faculty at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Ben Marcus
Studios
Sprague-Smith
Ben Marcus worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.
In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…