New American Stories, Edited by Ben Marcus, book review: Beautiful and bloody tales

Anyone who knows Ben Marcus from his own nervy postmodern fiction, in books like The Age of Wire and String and The Flame Alphabet, will have fair warning as to what to expect from this generous and beautifully designed paperback brick of an anthology. In his editor's introduction Marcus talks of wanting to show "just what the short story can do", and then invites us to "get bloodied and killed in thirty-two different ways".