Ben Marcus - Leaving the Sea - Stories

To Peter Mendelsund: Thank you for your beautiful work.

Ben Marcus is the author of three books of fiction: The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, and The Flame Alphabet, and he is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Granta, Electric Literature, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Tin House, and Conjunctions. He has received the Berlin Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, three Pushcart Prizes, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife and children.

Other titles by Ben Marcus available in eBook format

The Flame Alphabet • 978-0-307-95751-1

Notable American Women • 978-0-307-42705-2

Visit: www.benmarcus.com

Like: www.facebook.com/Ben.M.Marcus

For more information, please visit www.aaknopf.com

The Age of Wire and String

Notable American Women

The Father Costume

The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories (Editor)

The Flame Alphabet

Copyright © 2014 by Ben Marcus

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Selected stories in this work were previously published in the following: “On Not Growing Up” (Spring 2008) in Conjunctions; “Fear the Morning” as “The Morning Tour” (Fall 2004) in The Denver Quarterly; “Watching Mysteries with My Mother” (May 2012) in Electric Literature; “First Love” in The Ex-File (Context Books, February 2000); “The Father Costume” as The Father Costume (Artspace Books, May 2002); “Origins of the Family” as “Bones” (February 2001) in Frieze; “The Loyalty Protocol” (January 2013) in Granta; “I Can Say Many Nice Things” (Summer 2013), “Against Attachment” as “Children Cover Your Eyes” (February 2005) and “My Views on the Darkness” (June 2009) in Harper’s; “Rollingwood” (March 2011), “What Have You Done?” (August 2011), and “The Dark Arts” as “Wouldn’t You Like to Join Me?” (May 2013) in The New Yorker; and “The Moors” (2009) and “Leaving the Sea” (September 2013) in Tin House . “The Moors” subsequently published as The Moors (Madras Press, December 2010).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marcus, Ben, 1967–

[Short stories. Selections]

Leaving the sea : stories / Ben Marcus. —First edition.

pages ; cm.

“This is a Borzoi Book.”

ISBN: 9780307379382

eBook ISBN: 9780385350433

I. Title.

PS3563.A6375L43 2014 813'.54—dc23 2013004576

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund

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