The Emerald Light in the Air

With a New Introduction by Jonathan Franzen.

There’s Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, and Noah; Nick, Dennis, Bertram, Russell, and Virgil. The doctor, the documentary filmmaker, and the sculptor in burning steal; the eldest, the youngest, and the celebrated “perfect” brother, Benedict. In Donald Antrim’s mordantly funny novel , our narrator and his colossal fraternity of ninety-eight brothers (one couldn’t make it) have assembled in the crumbling library of their family’s estate for a little sinister fun. Executed with the invention and intelligence of Barthelme and Pynchon, Antrim’s taxonomy of male specimens is in equal proportions disturbing and absurdly hilarious.

Ben Marcus, one of the most innovative and vital writers of this generation, delivers a stellar anthology of the best short fiction being written today in America.

In , the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story. In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and unforgettable works, puts on wide display the true art of an American idiom.

In his first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson For a Better World, Donald Antrim demonstrates all of the skill that critics have hailed in his subsequent work: the pitch-perfect ear, the cunning imagination, and the uncanny control of a narrative at once familiar and incandescently strange.

In Pete Robinson’s seaside suburban town, things have, well, fallen into disrepair. The voters have de-funded schools, the mayor has been drawn and quartered by an angry mob of townsmen, and Turtle Pond Park is stocked with claymore mines. Pete Robinson, third grade teacher with a 1:32 scale model of an Inquisition dungeon in his basement, wants to open a new school, and in his effort to do so he stumbles upon another idea: he needs to run for mayor. Uniquely hilarious, this novel is a horrifyingly insightful tale of a world not so very different from the one in which we live.

With The Verificationist, Donald Antrim, acclaimed author of The Hundred Brothers, confirms his place as one of America's strangest and fiercely intelligent young writers.

One April night, a group of psychologists from the Krakower Institute meet at a pancake house, where they order breakfast foods and engage in shop talk and the occasional flirtation. At the center of this maelstrom of pyschobabble and unrequited lust sits Tom, program coordinator for the Young Women of Strength, who has been known to sob uncontrollably at meetings. When Tom tries to initiate a food fight, a rival psychologist bear hugs him into submission, resulting in an out-of-body experience that leaves our Tom hovering over his colleagues. In the hands of Donald Antrim, this unique perspective becomes an exuberantly funny riff on our culture that does nothing less than expose the core of emotions underlying the most basic of human needs.

From "a fiercely intelligent writer" (), a wry, poignant story of the difficult love between a mother and a son.

In the winter of 2000, shortly after his mother's death from cancer and malnourishment, Donald Antrim, author of the absurdist, visionary masterworks and , began writing about his family. In pieces that appeared in and were anthologized in , Antrim explored

his intense and complicated relationships with his mother, Louanne, an artist and teacher who was, at her worst, a ferociously destabilized and destabilizing alcoholic; his gentle grandfather, who lived in the mountains of North Carolina and who always hoped to save his daughter from herself; and his father, who married Louanne twice.

The Afterlife