Tuesday 23 April at 7.00 p.m.

In the words of Joshua Cohen, writing in the LRB (21 June 2012) 'Marcus is a writer in an antique mode: the modern.' His work is notoriously 'difficult', but in Marcus's terms difficulty is something to be embraced as both necessary and potentially enlightening. As he wrote in his celebrated 2005 essay for Harper's 'Why Experimental Fiction Threatens to Destroy Publishing, Jonathan Franzen and Life as We Know It' 'Although this [literary] language might at first seem alien, immersion in its ways can show us unprecedented worlds of feeling and thought. Literary language is complex because it is trying to achieve something extraordinarily difficult.' Ben Marcus will be at the shop to talk about his work with the LRB's senior editor Christian Lorentzen, and to mark the publication of the paperback edition of his latest novel The Flame Alphabet and a new edition of his first book The Age of Wire and String (both from Granta).