When I give information, I feel like I'm killing a story. And I often think, 'OK, this answers a question,' but in answering that question, some kind of potency is lost. 'I've written versions of all of these stories with a little more information,' says Marcus.

A guy loses his job when the day-care centre shuts down, and his boss literally cannot hear what he's saying about it. An unspecified civil emergency forces a whole town into the school gym. In 'The Dark Arts', the protagonist conducts an internal 'dissertation-level inquiry into the limits of revulsion regarding people who ostensibly love each other.' The stories are dystopic, nightmarish, Kafkaesque in their refusal to explain their own distortions. 'This was break time,' writes Marcus, 'which meant he needed to replenish his stores of fraudulence for the next round.' In the story 'I Can Say Many Nice Things', a creative writing tutor working on a cruise ship regards his class with dismay and exhibits self-loathing. They are also recognisable and very funny. Marcus's characters are hideous, selfish, frightened, inadequate. We are in Marcus's office at Columbia University where the 46-year-old teaches creative writing, trying to instil in his students the notion that provoking a response in the reader – 'the goal of getting them to care' – is, as he says drily, 'really tricky'. 'I think it raises a lot of alarms for people.' And yet, 'in a lot of ways they get to a similar emotional place.' 'There are challenges to that,' says Marcus, with some understatement. As the collection progresses, things gets weirder, until you reach the final story – 40 pages of interior monologue describing a man's walk down a corridor behind a woman with whom he is obsessed. They take place in a recognisable America, in which characters interact with each other while moving through space and time in more or less the conventional fashion. T he first few stories in Ben Marcus's Leaving the Sea are designed to welcome in the unwitting browser.

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