The Flame Alphabet will be published by Knopf in January 2012.

Some early comments:

“Language kills in Marcus’s audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness . . . Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus’s novel twists America’s quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience.”
—Publishers Weekly (Starred review and Pick of the week)

“Echoes of Ballard’s insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka’s terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes and re-echoes—I mean ourworld—out of which the sanely insane genius of Ben Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of.  And yet as I read The Flame Alphabet, late into the night, feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of the classic.”
—Michael Chabon

“The Flame Alphabet drags the contemporary novel—kicking, screaming, and foaming at the mouth—back towards the track it should be following. Ben Marcus makes language as toxic as it is seductive— a virus that comes from  much closer to home than we suspected.”
—Tom McCarthy

“Ben Marcus is the rarest kind of writer: a necessary one.  It’s become impossible to imagine the literary world—the world itself—without his daring, mind-bending and heartbreaking writing.”
—Jonathan Safran Foer

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From the dust jacket:

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children’s speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighborhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction.

With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents’ sickness, unaware that in just a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn’t so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition.
 
The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.

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There are some details about the book in the following interviews:

Harper’s, The New Yorker, Knopf, We Are Champion, HTML Giant, The Man Game

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Pre-order The Flame Alphabet:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
iBookstore
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McNally Jackson
Powell’s
Tattered Cover

Vintage Books, 2002

On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.

PRAISE

“Ben Marcus has been accused of redesigning the ordinary sentence, of emptying words of their meaning and injecting them with new, of treating grave matters (such as family and humankind in general) with farcical disrespect, and of blowing away traditional narrative structures with a diabolical wind. And all this may be true. But for those who would describe this work as fantastic, surreal, or anti-real, I can only say that this is Ohio exactly as I remember it. Jane Dark was my fourth grade teacher.” —Robert Coover

“Notable American Women is a weird nougat of a book that suggests Coetzee, Kafka, Beckett, Barthelme, O’Brien, Orwell, Paley, Borges—and none of them exactly. Finally you just have to chew it for its own private juice.” —Padgett Powell

“Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women is a radical performance in American fiction. It is too literary for the novel as it is now practiced and consumed, and too perverse for other plausible designations. In order to pioneer the Marcus life-project the writer provides a ferocious handbook which, followed to the letter, launches a permanent revolution of nothingness. A family of unprecedented personae—the Marcuses, aided on the distaff side by Jane Dark, her listeners and Silentists—are brought forth to insure the evolution of “a new category.” The writer “fathers” an extensive formal vocabulary to advance the Behavior Bible’s annihilating goals, including uncomely devices and strategies like the fainting tank, the thought rag, the shushing posture, along with an array of essential life-project products such as the Ben Marcus Locater Bell, Chew Stand, Apology Center, Thompson Waterô, etc. It is killingly funny, and creepily sad. This book represents an unmediated thrusting toward love with an arsenal of intellectual alienation, and just as forcefully, a thrusting toward alienation with an arsenal of brotherly love–depending upon where you are poised to withstand the cataclysm. It is a profound and profane description of our basest drive: fear. Notable American Women is the work of a retiring albeit twisted virtuoso. Not for the pusillanimous reader.” —C. D. Wright

“Ben Marcus has created an innovative and unflinching portrait of the turmoil of the human condition, providing the reader a most rare gift: something truly new. Notable American Women contains strains of Donald Antrim and Samuel Beckett but is beholden to neither; it is a brave, original book.” —Myla Goldberg

“Notable American Women gives us, with great panache and in eerie detail, a world that is cruelly reasonable within the near-religious limitations of its weird laws and customs. It is a book as unique as it is wonderfully strange.” —Gilbert Sorrentino

“Notable American Women is an enchanting and moving novel. Like Italo Calvino and Lewis Carrol, Ben Marcus reconfigures the world that we might see ourselves in a cultural and moral landscape that is disturbingly familiar, yet entirely new. As though granted a new beginning, Marcus renames the creatures of our world, questions who we are and who, as men and women, we might be. Notable American Women is a wonder book, pleasurable and provocative.” —Maureen Howard

“Auden, who asked two things of an imagined world—that it be somehow like ours and somehow unlike—would be Ben Marcus’s ideal reader, yet even without the poet’s dire program, I am altogether taken by this hilarious and sexy alternative universe. Just imagine! it is all done with words instead of mirrors, so much more reliable and so much more heartbreaking. Thus Prospero enthralls his crew.” —Richard Howard

“Ben Marcus’s novel is funny and touching and full of movement and sound, all of which is even more remarkable since the book itself is about stillnesses and The Silentists and Behavior Water and things you put in your mouth to keep you from speaking. Marcus investigates—with equal passion—the intricacies of a new mythology alongside the intimacies of a broken family. This is the kind of strange and beautiful book you just want to have around, to dip into again and again.” —Aimee Bender

“I don’t use the word lightly, in fact, I don’t use it at all, but Ben Marcus is a genius, one of the most daring, funny, morally engaged and brilliant writers, someone whose work truly makes a difference in the world. His prose is, for me, awareness objectified—he makes the word new and thus the world.” —George Saunders

“Marcus (The Age of Wire and String) has crafted a dystopian novel in the tradition of Brave New World and 1984, with an overlay of 21st-century irony and faux naïveté. Writing in off-kilter documentary-style prose laden with acronyms and neologisms, he often wanders into ponderous whimsicality, but stretches of the novel are inspired riffs on contemporary totems and anxieties. Ambitious and polished, if sometimes willfully opaque, this is an intriguing debut.” —Publisher’s Weekly

“[Ben Marcus] constructs his narratives as an astronomer would a space telescope, so as to better observe and laugh at the earthly conventions of realism. . . . Imagine The World According to Garp as rewritten by Edward Gorey. . . . Marcus’s prose can spiral up and away into sublime nonsense.” —Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Ben Marcus’s first novel Notable American Women is a beautifully strange and compelling family allegory—Midwest mum and dad raise their son to shun all emotions—rendered in language that seems imported from a universe of deepest feeling, of intellect, of poetry, and, in the end, of majestic heart.”—Elle

“Marcus negotiates an esoteric though uniquely American literary terrain…. Marcus reinvents the family drama….The book evokes an alternate reality revealing the dark side of our common history, an…America that exists [only] in Marcus’s lyrical, abstract prose. This will be a difficult read for many, but it will surely stand the test of time as a genuinely important book.” Library Journal

“[A] stunning, strange and beautiful novel.” Esquire

“[A] darkly funny caricature of modern life.” Time Out New York

Behold a stunning world, made mostly of water, where clothing changes people’s behavior and time itself can be worn and discarded like cloth. Witness a father who takes his two boys out to sea, in flight from some menace at home, thus launching their adventures in a strange and dangerous territory. Artist Matthew Ritchie’s striking images blend scientific diagramming with vivid, colorful renderings of the apocalypse, while writer Ben Marcus’s cold prose plumbs the inner workings of two boys caught out at sea with a father whose costumes grow increasingly menacing. In this collaborative work, Ritchie’s and Marcus’s shared obsessions of mythology, physics, and ancient texts have produced a conjunction of text and image in which people themselves are merely costumes for the darker needs that drive them.

In The Age of Wire and String, hailed by Robert Coover as “the most audacious literary debut in decades,” Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles, and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus’s first collection — part fiction, part handbook– as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings.

Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations — both comic and disturbing — in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.

Praise

“The most audacious literary debut in decades — witty, startlingly inventive, funny but fundamentally disturbing, language itself held together here by whimsical bits of wire and string. Ben Marcus is a one-of-a-kind stand-up phenom, a comic writer of power and originality. The Age of Wire and String marks the arrival of a unique new talent in American letters.” — Robert Coover

“An extraordinary first novel. . . . The Age of Wire and String, a treasury of interconnected fables of violence and hope, stands out as an exhilarating work of literature.” — Steven Poole, Times Literary Supplement

“A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows.” — Kirkus Reviews

“Utterly wonderful, wonderful and beautiful. A world appears made of birds, dogs, odd bits of the Self, and ancient impressions of the very first things — Father and Mother, strange foods, a storm in the sky outside — all the elements of ordinary life systematically recombined to give substance to feeling and sensation, our deepest and most hidden knowledge of home.” — Donald Antrim

“In his entirely self-generated possible world, Ben Marcus immolates American notions about family, culture, and the domestic drama, and asks questions later. What remains in the epicenter of the conflagration are fragile, longing, and funny ruminations on the secret lives of objects and environments — written in some of the most breathtaking prose I’ve encountered lately.” — Rick Moody

“This book is a coolly lyrical, sometimes tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-scientific description of the Earth and the life of its various populations — as though Marcus were a sociologist describing the world in which everything is wired to everything else. . . . The Age of Wire and String anticipates a career devoted to intelligent exploration of major themes.” — Kelly Cherry, Chicago Tribune

“Simply put, The Age of Wire and String defies all the literary traditions we hold dear, more so than any other novel in recent memory. . . . [It] is raw ether, a work of literary chemistry that will soften your brain and sharpen your senses.” — Weekly Alibi

“Don’t walk into this world expecting to know which way is up; just sit back and enjoy the view from a completely new perspective.” — Details

“Marcus proves himself a renegade philosopher/writer who twists language until it bleeds new meaning, and in the process creates a truly audacious and wholly original view of life and the linguistic structures which give it substance. . . . In a book industry increasingly dominated by convention and the next sure thing, we can only hope that writers who dare to explore this inner vision will continue to find an audience.” — Tucson Weekly

“His stories, a series of interlocking definitions of strange new objects and principles, are a mix of gothic gargoyles and glassy ultra-modern surfaces, whether he’s describing an automobile from the ground up, or a nap in front of the TV with the family dog.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Anchor Books, 2004
Edited with an Introduction by Ben Marcus

In twenty-nine separate but ingenious ways, these stories seek permanent residence within a reader. They strive to become an emotional or intellectual cargo that might accompany us wherever, or however, we go.  If we are made by what we read, if language truly builds people into what they are, how they think, the depth with which they feel, then these stories are, to me, premium material for that construction project. You could build a civilization with them.

Award-winning author of Notable American Women, Ben Marcus brings us this engaging and comprehensive collection of short stories that explore the stylistic variety of the medium in America today.

Contributors:
Sea Oak by George Saunders
Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
Do Not Disturb by A.M. Homes
The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender
The Caretaker by Anthony Doerr
The Old Dictionary by Lydia Davis
The Father’s Blessing by Mary Caponegro
The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders by Aleksandar Hemon
People Shouldn’t Have to be the Ones to Tell You by Gary Lutz
Histories of the Undead by Kate Braverman
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine by Jhumpa Lahiri
Down the Road by Stephen Dixon
X Number of Possibilities by Joanna Scott
Tiny, Smiling Daddy by Mary Gaitskill
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men by David Foster Wallace
The Sound Gun by Matthew Derby
Short Talks by Anne Carson
Field Events by Rick Bass
Scarliotti and the Sinkhole by Padgett Powell

PRAISE

“Intelligent, entertaining, and wide-ranging, this anthology is a primer on the contemporary short story and should be required reading for anyone interested in the form.”
Tin House

“An ambitious new anthology crammed with today’s big names (Gaitskill, Saunders, Wallace) proves that even in a postmodern age, good storytelling fulfills a primal need.”
Salon

“Different readers will likely prefer some selections to others, but all will have to agree that Marcus has collected a respectable sampling of some of today’s finest writers.”
Booklist