The Last Election, with Andrew Yang
A gripping, intricately plotted political thriller set on the campaign trail of the USA’s next—and because of crucial flaws in the electoral system—its last election; from former presidential candidate Andrew Yang and author Stephen Marche.
"Yang and Marche masterfully ratchet the tension to near-unbearable levels." Starred review for The Last Election in Publishers’ Weekly.
Death of an Author, by Aidan Marchine
When Gus Dupin, literary critic and scholar, finds himself invited to the funeral of Peggy Firmin, celebrated novelist and now murder victim, he is determined to find out who killed her and why. As his investigation gets underway, it is not long before he finds himself at the center of an experiment at Marlow AI, a large language model company.
Why was he included in this experiment and what role did Firmin play? Further, why is Dupin suddenly a suspect in Firmin’s murder? And worse: is he the next victim? As Dupin attempts to unravel the mystery of the death of his favorite author, listeners find themselves in an alternate reality that raises a sinister question: what is the appropriate relationship between humans and machines and is murder the consequence when it goes too far?
A revolution in narrative and an unprecedented use of Artificial Intelligence, Death of an Author is a masterful and stunning examination of the nature of storytelling and the power of language.
“Death of an Author, by Stephen Marche, is the best example yet of the great writing that can be done with an LLM like ChatGPT. Not only is it an exciting read, it's clearly the product of an astute author and a machine with the equivalent of a million PhDs in genre fiction.” — Wired Magazine
“Death of an Author is more intriguing than many of the human-written mysteries.” — Slate
On Writing and Failure
Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer’s life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid’s exile and Dostoevsky’s mock execution to James Baldwin’s advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.
“I want to buy up a big lot of Marche’s contribution and hand them out to anyone struggling to write”
—Vanity Fair
“[Marche’s] writing style is buoyant and funny. […] When the stars are aligned, someone writes a work as provocative, informed and droll as On Writing and Failure.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR
The Next Civil War
“The narrative delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary. Should be required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.” — The New York Times Book Review
On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight—a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts— and tips America over the edge into ruin.
The Unmade Bed
“The Unmade Bed is a rollicking read and a very frank look at an important set of issues from the male perspective.”
— Anne-Marie Slaughter, author of Unfinished Business
A wide-ranging exploration of the complicated, changing relationship between men and women in today’s society. One fascinating element sets this book apart: Marche’s wife Sarah Fulford, a successful writer herself, has extensively annotated the book, documenting her own thoughts and experiences, unabashedly pointing out flaws in Marche's reasoning and contributing her own opinions. The result is a uniquely balanced and honest approach to the revolution going on in our everyday lives, everywhere that men and women coexist.
The Hunger
of the Wolf
The Hunger of the Wolf is a modern masterpiece: The Great Gatsby for the new Gilded Age.”
— James Frey
A novel about the way we live now: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dream-and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit—set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness. It is a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept within families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul. Spanning from the mills of Depression-era Pittsburgh to the Swinging London of the 1960s, from desolate Alberta to the factories of present-day China, it is a bold and breathtakingly ambitious work of fiction that uses the story of a single family to capture the way we live now.
Love and
the Mess We're In
“This country’s master creator of parallel universes.”
— The National Post
When Viv flies to Buenos Aires for a secret liaison with Clive, there is no ambiguity as to their intentions—adultery. But this is where conventionality terminates in Love and the Mess We’re In, a work whose lyric richness and inventiveness skillfully embody the tumbles and turns of love in a postmodern age. Marche collaborates with award-winning typographer Andrew Steeves to create richly polyschematic book pages--a series of posters rather than pages--whose influences range from the interwoven texts, geometric shaping and pattern-making of Hebraic calligraphy, illuminated manuscripts and incunabular typography to the ordered tangle of a New York City subway map.
How Shakespeare Changed Everything
“A sprightly, erudite sampling of Shakespeare’s influence on absolutely everything.” — National Post
W.H. Auden once wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen. It exists in the valley of its saying where executives would never want to tamper.” Shakespeare has wandered away from the valley of his saying and hangs around in the most unlikely places, in 1950’s teen rebel movies and in psychoanalysts’ offices, in nightclubs and in mall food courts, in voting booths in the American South and in the trash of Central Park. The effects of his words on the world have been out of all proportion, monstrous and sublime, vertiginous in their consequences, far beyond anything he could have predicted. How Shakespeare Changed Everything finds Shakespeare’s various effects on world history, which would have boggled his own capacious imagination.
Shining at the Bottom of the Sea
“May be the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.”— New York Times Book Review
An anthology from a fictional country called Sanjania, complete with its national symbols, political movements, folk heroes, a group of writers dubbed “fictioneers,” a national airline called Sanjair, and a rich literary history. Sanjania is an island nation whose English-speaking citizens draw upon the English, American, Australian, and Canadian literary traditions. This brilliant novel is an anthology, taking the reader from the rough and tumble pamphlets of 1870s Sanjania to the burgeoning Sanjanian nationalistic awareness in the 1930s literary journal, The Real Story, to the extraordinary longing of the writings of the Sanjanian Diaspora.
Raymond and Hannah
“So dazzling, so unsentimental… A work that is both beautiful and confusing. In other words, an honest love story.”
— New York Times Book Review
This boldly contemporary love story combines sex and seriousness, physical lust and spiritual longing. Raymond and Hannah hook up at a party; a one-night stand expands into a weeklong passionate and surprisingly deep love affair. Then Hannah leaves for a year in Jerusalem. With six thousand miles separating their bodies, the energy of love and lust must be sublimated to the written word. While Hannah immerses herself in Torah and the Orthodox world of Jerusalem, Raymond remains in multicultural Toronto, working on his dissertation on Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.
In this remarkable debut, carnal love confronts religion and culture, and modern passion finds its counterpoint in ancient texts.