Ben Marcus, author portrait
© Chris Doyle

Ben Marcus

BEN MARCUS is the author of four books of fiction-- The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet, and Leaving the Sea--and is the editor of two short story anthologies: The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and New American Stories. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in Granta, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Believer, The New York Times, and Tablet. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and three Pushcart Prizes. He lives with his family in New York City, where he is on the faculty at Columbia University.

What Students Will Be Reading: Campus Common Reading Roundup, 2025-26

With the fall semester in full swing, colleges and universities around the country have announced their Common Reading books for the upcoming 2025-26 academic year. We’ve compiled a list of over 286 programs and their title selections from publicly available sources, which you can download here: First-Year Reading 2025-26. We will continue to update this

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Register for the 2026 Penguin Random House First-Year Experience® Conference Author Events!

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2026 Catalog for First-Year & Common Reading

We are delighted to present our new First-Year & Common Reading Catalog for 2026! From award-winning fiction, poetry, memoir, and biography to new books about the environment, current events, history, public health, science, social justice, student success, and technology, the titles presented in our common reading catalog will have students not only eagerly flipping through

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