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Who

Marcus is a hyper-experimental author and head of the creative writing program at Columbia University. He's also married to novelist Heidi Julavits.

Backstory

The son of academics (his mother is feminist critic Jane Marcus), Marcus graduated from NYU and got his MFA from Brown. His first book was 1995's The Age of Wire and String, a series of fragmentary and bizarre vignettes. ("One often literally does not know what Marcus is talking about," one reviewer noted.) In 2002 he published Notable American Women, the story of a character named Ben Marcus who lives on a farm in Ohio with a female cult called the Silentists. The same year, he released an unusual collaboration with (the equally obtuse) conceptual artist Matthew Ritchie: The Father Costume is a "conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them." Marcus has contributed to various publications including Harper's and the Paris Review, and is currently chair of Columbia's creative writing program, having been passed over in 2005 for the more prestigious post of head of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Faculty member Marilynne Robinson threatened to resign if he were given the job.

Drama

Marcus's epic-length 2005 essay in Harper's, "Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen, and Life as We Know It," cast Marcus as a heroic avant-garde standard-bearer and the author of books that might not actually sell but are bursting with intrinsic worth, with Franzen as the mercenary, conservative sell-out who plays to the masses and is killing literary culture. Marcus himself has long been the target of abuse from lunatic agitators the Underground Literary Alliance, who regard him as "immersed in establishment cronyism" due to his job at Columbia and his connections to the Dave Eggers/McSweeney's crowd: Marcus's wife Heidi Julavits is a founding editor of Eggers-funded magazine The Believer.

Personal

Marcus and Julavits have two children. The family split their time between Brooklyn and Brookline, Maine.