The Nachbar across the Straße appeared in his Door, swaddled in Bademantel and crouching over to retrieve the Zeitung from the Treppe. Gertrudis waited until he was returned inside, then again honked the Autohupe and waved for me to join her. And I did, bolting the Door behind me.

Don’t just stand there—get in, said Gertrudis and I sat beside her. I strapped myself in, the Seatbelt strangling me due to my low status—too low to see out through the Windschutzscheibe. Gertrudis was seated low also, but she’d spurted and was able to reach the Gaspedal. The Problem was seeing in front of us, and also the Auto being Stickshift and jerking forward, until the Motor cut and we almost crashed into the Bordstein. But finally Gertrudis managed to pull out onto the Straße and drive down the Block, around the Straßenecke headed—I had no Idea where we were headed, and neither did Gertrudis. And I don’t think she cared if we only drove around the Block and then back again, but I remember we passed a Milchviehbetrieb and then the Fußballplatz surrounded by Wäldern, covered with Schnee and soon it started snowing again, thick Schneeflocken, and soon we merged from a small winding Landstraße onto a larger Straße, driving alongside other Autos and Transportwagen and even a Traktoren, and Gertrudis sat up, gripping the Lenkrad, terrified.

Passing over the submerged Bahngleise, we nearly crashed into the Traktoren, but at the last Moment Gertrudis sped up, skidding out into the wrong Spur, blinding Headlights. Somehow Gertrudis remained calm and again changed back into the other Spur, speeding out in front of the Traktoren, missing the incoming Milchwagen but then sliding across an Eisdecke and leaping the Bordestein, until at last we plunged through Schaufenster into a Coiffure, shattering Glas and also the Windschutzscheibe. Between us, a Schaufensterpuppe was lodged but I escaped through the Fenster and circled around to check on Gertrudis.

She was knocked out, slumped forward over the Lenkrad, her Stirn gashed. I remember standing there a Moment, watching her under a great Stille—before the Polizeisirenen screamed faraway and Gertrudis awoke, startled and confused, but then smiling. That was fun, I remember she said while I helped her out through her shattered Fenster—her Arme splintered, but otherwise she was OK. Next time, I promise I won’t almost kill you. And then she started laughing, until the Polizei came and then the Krankenwagen, and laughing also at the Krankenhaus while Doktoren attended to her and after, when Opa arrived, furious. And when Vater and Mutter returned, they were also furious, but Gertrudis laughed it off again then and that was Gertrudis, the same Gertrudis, if older, who wanted to be in a Musikvideoproduktion, although if not the Russen in Beanie and Masken would have found her elsewhere—when we ventured out later that Abend, or the next Morgen, the last I’d see Gertrudis alive.

Alec Michod is the author of the novel THE WHITE CITY (St. Martin’s). He is currently working on a second book. You can find him online at www.alecmichod.com.

From the acclaimed novelist and The Believer editor HEIDI JULAVITS, a wildly imaginative and emotionally intense novel about mothers, daughters, and the psychic damage women can inflict on one another.

Is the bond between mother and daughter unbreakable, even by death?

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, the legendary Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother’s suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, and Julia gains power, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.

Julia retreats to a faceless job in Manhattan. But others have noted Julia’s emerging gifts, and soon she’s recruited to track down an elusive missing person—a controversial artist who might have a connection to her mother. As Julia sifts through ghosts and astral clues, everything she thought she knew of her mother is called into question, and she discovers that her ability to know the minds of others—including her own—goes far deeper than she ever imagined.

As powerful and gripping as all of Julavits’s acclaimed novels, The Vanishers is a stunning meditation on grief, female rivalry, and the furious power of a daughter’s love.

Purchase: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, Powell’s.

Available on 17 January, 2012

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Readings:
KGB, Philadelphia, Book Court, McNally Jackson, Austin, Denver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles – UCLA Hammer, Los Angeles – Skylight, Chicago, Iowa, Syracuse, Ithaca… Complete List of Events

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Early reviews:
Publisher’s Weekly, Vanity Fair, Bookforum, HTML Giant, Booklist (see below), Library Journal, HTML Giant 2, Kirkus

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Excerpts:
Harper’s, Bomb

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Audio:
Poets & Writers

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Facebook

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Pre-order:
Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBookstore, IndieBound, McNally Jackson, Powell’s

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Interviews:

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

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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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BOOKLIST (Starred Review)
Issue: December 15, 2011

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. This ingenious and provoking premise enables the boldly imaginative Marcus (Notable American Women, 2001), recipient of a remarkable array of major literary awards, to explore the paradoxes of family and how the need to communicate can go utterly wrong. As this confounding, heartrending plague spreads from Jewish families to the general population, gravely ill adults flee; teens, who take to terrorizing adults with megaphones, are quarantined; and society breaks down. Claire and Sam, the ailing parents of virulently weaponized Esther, belong to a secret sect of “forest Judaism,” which involves listening to mysterious transmissions emitted from the earth. Their tiny, sylvan synagogue becomes the focus of an aggressive stranger, who directs a grim work camp hastily assembled to find a cure for this catastrophic affliction at any cost. Marcus conducts a febrile and erudite inquiry into “the threat of language,” offering incandescent insights into ancient alphabets and mysticism, ostracism and exodus, incarceration with Holocaust echoes, and Kafkaesque behavioral science. Ultimately, the suspenseful, if excessively procedural, apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus’ blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.

— Donna Seaman

Episode 9 was about time passing in my father’s city, the old place. The screen was on your lap so I got close.  This was another place, and a time too. The problem of PST and EST. Of new old cities. Your persistent Southern drawl. Only here could you wear a pink shirt and sell cupcakes. Only now could I wake in a big house, see the red bridge, and feel sore.

The dealers on their corners had the whispers. OC, they said. OC, they said. And Glow.

Vermin, buds from Mendocino, pills that sent me to the sun. I left a colder climate for this place. We ate pie though! We talked about sea light and I tucked my legs under. The man on the sidewalk had his head in the gutter and his seizures were gentle like waves. Then came fog, lapping.

You watched the screen; I watched you. We were everyday viewers by then. In Episode 18 the plane moved fast and then dinosaurs were there.

You met me at SFO. We’d met at JFK, SEA, BDL and OAK. This was like that but more. More than anything, we wanted our bodies to care. We’d become skilled at dialing numbers. We excelled at counting hours, always plus or minus three.

Your friend inked skin on 20^th and Florida. Once we slept on her floor and you reached for me in a hard way. Once you pushed your thumbs into my ribs and bit. You were gone in the morning but the bridge was there. Did you know I was born near this town?

We ran through the big place. The octopus was not in its tank but in the dome the air was hot and things were thick and thriving. In the glass dome, we ran like hamsters. We leaned back in chairs that made us lean back. It got dark and planets moved. We learned that eight are the minutes it takes sunlight. I left a brighter city for your face.

You’d take whatever to feel the good thing. You said I could fly too. Maybe roaches roamed the walls or they didn’t. Episode 17 was about war. We watched until late in the day when fog gave up and sun shot through your blinds, then we marched up hills into the red ball falling. People hung from trolleys, which moved faster than us. You said sometimes I dream about Nazis. I said stranger men have touched me. We were mean things then, drinking wine in the small room, and I felt like a child. You said sorry. I said this will all be fiction anyway.

So I went back to the airport, which was easy enough.

In this place, you closed when I opened. In this time, sun came out at dusk. I said we are not thick or thriving. Maybe I tried to hold you but your hand was on the trunk. We’ve stood like this at Arrivals. We’ve stood like this at Departures. How much do we hate Baggage Claim?

Back toward my father’s city where light is light until it’s night. A screen is in the seat. I watch a clock, a score, ten men and an orange ball. The plane races the sun, which will always win by three. Sometimes I think you chose me, though I’m sure that I exploit you. Stowed items shift in transit, say the ladies in their gray. So look for me when sun passes over the blue dome. I’ll look for you there too.

Amanda Shapiro lives in Durham, North Carolina. “Twilight Zones” is part of a recently completed collection of short stories called The Distance That You Love. She has an MFA from Columbia University, and her work has been published in Porchlight.

Erin Cosgrove is making the book trailer for The Flame Alphabet.  It should be finished in the next few weeks.  For now, here’s another still:

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

After work and into late evening, Megan walks. She wears thick, navy colored sweatpants with the white letters T.O.U.G.H. stretched and cracked running the left thigh. Gray sneakers laced tight. Like the sweatpants, her son bought the shirt she wears – a lumpy orange colored thing possessing a centered sun with googly eyes, a giant smiling mouth, and two stick-legs pushed into white shoes. This is Megan’s exercise outfit regardless of the weather. When she’s done, covered in a heavy under-layer sweat, she undresses, neatly folds the sweatpants and shirt, and places them in a stack with the sneakers on top in the closet for the next day. Clothing is washed on Sunday mornings. Laundry day.

Megan lives three miles outside downtown Ellsworth in the suburbs, which is a term she enjoys. She pronounces the word Sub-urb. Her house is located on Babbling Brook Lane. The home is small and white with a healthy front lawn and a mailbox corkscrewed in flowers a woman once took a photograph of.

Megan power-walks with arms pumping. Her legs move slow, she raises the knees high and brings the feet down hard. Her odd outside walk is a result of walking in place, from the video she played each morning during the winter months. When cars pass, two out of three drivers subconsciously slow down, their foot easing off the gas. They stare at her exaggerated exhales, her knees to bright orange covered breasts, the arms upper-cutting a barrage of opponents. Megan is short, squat, heavyset, the motions so serious drivers can’t help but laugh and save the night for guilt. She’s a sight demanding attention and she is totally unaware.

Megan walks an area called The Bend – a U shaped road extending over a cliff, going further into the farm than all other city points. When the road starts to curve and she can turn to her left and behold the little brown shacks of the farm, Megan knows she has completed half her walk.

A turquoise blob oozes upward from the horizon before splintering into thin creases that arch like tentacles above. This type of sky happens several times a year. Megan’s favorite. She admires the colors and wipes the sweat from her forehead with a forearm. The air is thick with heat that is unwilling to break even in late evening.

Tall grasses lean away from a guardrail, wanting to hide from the sun.

Megan walks in place at the peak of The Bend. She looks at the farm, at the black swirl of crystal mine, a few green trucks sixty years old rumbling through the dusty streets.

Homes, the trucks, children playing tag in a patch of dirt, wheelbarrows on their side in front yards, metal fences, stone curbs, and the mine itself, all glazed over with the color from the sky, a weird metallic blue.

She sees a child covered in black-dust wearing red shorts running like a dog.

Megan forgot her water bottle at home even though she made sure to wear the nylon belt with the holster. Her throat has been gathering gunk ever since she turned off her street. Whatever is climbing up her throat needs to go someplace, so Megan spits over the guardrail and in the direction of the dog-child. Nearby, a grown man playing with a radio controlled car raises an eyebrow, smirks.

She walks in place, heart-rate peaked, thread of spit on her chin she doesn’t notice through the sweat, knees pumping high.

The dog-child stands and barks.

The distance down the cliff is substantial, but Megan thinks maybe, possibly, the dog-child thought she spit at her. She waves at the dog-child and mouths the words sorry about that. The dog-child howls on two feet. Megan breaks from her stationary marching-band motion, waves again, and finishes the rest of her walk in a near jog, the sides of her stomach spiked with pain, her hair a brown mop of dried frizz.

When Megan is inside her home she undresses.

In the shower she catches her breath.

In bed she can’t sleep but is safe.

Megan lies under the covers on her back, arms flat against her sides. She’ll have nightmares of the dog-child as a miniature dog-child running the length of her body. The miniature dog-child will mouth-dig chunks from her flesh and spit the gnarled squares into the sky, her favorite colored sky, above her thighs. Waiting inside the nightmare is a second nightmare about work. It’s the nightmare with Megan sitting at her computer in the office and the entire ceiling is a bed of white light. She’s alone in the office. The computer screen is black, and in the center, at a far distance, is a seven-year-old Megan, the body glowing red, waving at her.

Shane Jones lives in upstate New York. His first novel, Light Boxes, was originally published by Publishing Genius Press and reprinted by Penguin in 2010. Light Boxes has been translated in seven languages and was named an NPR best book of the year. In 2012 Penguin will release a new novel, Daniel Fights A Hurricane. Shane is also the author of the novella The Failure Six.

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund.

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

Here is an excerpt.

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

The New Yorker, We Are Champion, HTML Giant, The Man Game

Pre-order The Flame Alphabet:

Amazon, Barnes & Noble, McNally Jackson, Tattered Cover, Indie Bound

A film still from the trailer for The Flame Alphabet, which is being made by Erin Cosgrove.