News

The Jewish Daily Forward Reviews The Flame Alphabet

3.6.2012

“Writers and thinkers from Saint Augustine to Paul Celan have lamented the limitations of language, the fallacy that is communication. The theme is hardly new territory for Marcus, whose earlier books play with language as a literary device, but this is the first time the subject informs the content, rather than the structure, of his work. In this novel, which, unlike his previous works, is written in linear, narrative form, the author questions our notions of thought as somehow uncontaminated by the mechanistic forces of life. Characters and even the storyline are secondary, and the novel’s strength lies in its evocation of one man’s search for meaning in a wordless universe.”

Read more

(more...)

LA Times Reviews The Flame Alphabet

2.25.2012

“Wildly inventive in his imagery, Marcus sends drifts of salt to cover the land as the disease takes hold, frozen birds plummet from the skies and hellish packs of children roam the streets and attack helpless adults with the tone of their loud, poisonous voices.”

Full review here.

(more...)

New York Magazine Reviews The Flame Alphabet

1.30.2012

“The Flame Alphabet is a well-oiled heartbreak machine, with a laser focus on what Marcus calls “the power of family to both love and destroy you.””

Full review here.

(more...)

iBookstore – The Flame Alphabet is Book of the Week

1.20.2012

iBookstore

(more...)

NPR – All Things Considered

1.17.2012

In an election year, nasty rhetoric is par for the course. But what if all that toxic language was, well, actually toxic?

That’s the premise of The Flame Alphabet, the new novel by Ben Marcus.

(more...)

Salon Interview

1.16.2012

The Flame Alphabet is a novel at every sentence. It’s also a mystery, a compulsive page-turner and is told in a relatively straightforward, linear way — very few postmodern sleights of hand.

(more...)

The Flame Alphabet picked by Amazon as a best book of January

1.9.2012

Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012:

From the dark, curious imagination of Ben Marcus comes another brain melter of a novel. 

(more...)

Booklist, Starred Review

1.2.2012

The Flame Alphabet

Teenagers can be described as toxic, no doubt about it. But in Marcus’ speculative tale, teens are literally poisoning their parents each time they speak.

(more...)

Jonathan Lethem Reviews The Flame Alphabet on Amazon

12.30.2011

Featured Guest Review: Jonathan Lethem on The Flame Alphabet

Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language. 

(more...)

Audio reading of The Flame Alphabet

12.19.2011

Ben Marcus reads from The Flame Alphabet, forthcoming from Knopf in January 2012.

(more...)

man