This is the first Single Sentence Animation from Recommended Reading, Electric Literature’s new weekly fiction magazine.

Edwin Rostron animates a sentence from “Watching Mysteries With My Mother” by Ben Marcus. Music by Supreme Vagabond Craftsman.

The sentence: “We speak of having one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of having both feet and both legs and then one’s entire torso, arms, and head in the grave, inside a coffin, which is covered in dirt, upon which is planted a pretty little stone.”

Single Sentence Animations are creative collaborations. The writer selects a favorite sentence from his or her work and the animator creates a short film in response.

There really isn’t.

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April 18
Ithaca College, 7:30 p.m.
Clark Lounge, Campus Center
Ithaca, NY 14850
Map (Campus Center)

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May 16
Lannan Foundation, at Lensic Performing Arts Center, 7:00 p.m.
Interviewing Lydia Davis
Lensic Performing Arts Center
211 W. San Francisco St.
Santa Fe, NM 87501

Map

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EARLIER EVENTS:

Jan 12
KGB Bar, 7:00 p.m.
with Jim Shepard & Ben Lerner
85 East 4th Street (Between 2^nd & 3^rd Aves.)
New York, NY 10003
Map

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Jan 17
Philadelphia Free Library, 7:30 p.m.
with Shalom Auslander
1901 Vine Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
Map

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Jan 19
BookCourt (The Flame Alphabet Release Party), 7:00 p.m.
163 Court Street (Between Dean & Pacific St.)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Map

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Jan 23
McNally Jackson, 7:00 p.m.
with John Freeman, of Granta
52 Prince Street (between Lafayette & Mulberry)
New York, NY 10012
Map

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Jan 24
BookPeople, 7:00 p.m.
603 North Lamar Blvd.
Austin, TX 78703
Map

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Jan 25
Tattered Cover, 7:30 p.m.
2526 East Colfax Avenue
Denver, CO 80206
Map

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Jan 26
University Bookstore, 7:00 p.m.
2322 2^nd Avenue
Seattle, WA 98121
Map

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Jan 27
Powell’s Books, 7:30 p.m.
1005 West Burnside Street
Portland, OR 97209
Map

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Jan 31
City Lights, 7:00 p.m.
261 Columbus Avenue
San Francisco, CA 94133
Map

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Feb 1
Hammer Museum, 7:00 p.m.
with Samantha Hunt
10899 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90024
Map

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Feb 2
Skylight Books, 7:30 p.m.
1818 Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
Map

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Feb 7
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 6:00 p.m.
with Sam Lipsyte
37 S. Wabash Ave., Suite 1220
Chicago, IL 60603
Map

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Feb 9
Prairie Lights Books, 7:00 p.m.
Co-sponsored by the Writer’s Workshop
15 S. Dubuque St.
Iowa City, IA 52240
Map

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Feb 13
Franklin Park Bar & Beer Garden, 8:00 p.m.
Franklin Park Reading Series
618 St. Johns Place (Between Franklin & Classon Aves.)
Brooklyn, NY 11238
Map

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Published by Knopf on January 17, 2012.

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

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

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

from p. 48

“It was a small night.  Many people must have died for lack of space.  The weather was tuned to a shrink setting.  The air was swollen.  Beneath us, the waves slapped at the hull in a plain, repetitive code.  If I tried, I could just make out small, sharp words in the code, English words as if formed by a man with a beak for a mouth, singing through a cotton screen.  He was another man I didn’t want to know.  I found it was better not to listen.  They were not words I very much cared to hear.  But as I slid around inside my oversized costume, the world grew quiet again and soon I could sleep, a darkness over my body as thick and final as one of the very first wools.”

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The Father Costume was published by Artspace Books with images by Matthew Ritchie.  Here is a recent review.

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Deleted from an early draft of The Flame Alphabet.

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In bed that night we came as close as we ever had to discussing what we’d heard from Rabbi Burke.  Claire was quiet, directing her energy on getting me to speak first.  I waited her out.  The illness had gifted me with unrivalled patience.  Being patient was just a matter of not caring, and not caring could possibly be connected to something medical.  Symptoms so broad and diffuse encouraged the justification of any behavior.  Anything Claire wanted to say to me she could say without an invitation or outright courtship.  I wasn’t going to beg to hear more of our sorrow.  Or maybe I was, but not so easily.

I leaned over to flip out the light and the darkness felt exquisite on my face.  This was perhaps the most unrivalled moment in all of family life, the switching off of the bedroom lamp.  All obligation ceases.  Hiding, if one so desires, becomes suddenly possible for the first time all day.

The chief virtue of darkness is that people tend to leave you alone.  You can finally go unnoticed.

Beside me Claire huffed, and I rolled over, assumed the pose.

“You’re just going to go to sleep?” she finally said.

“No, of course not,” I said.

I wanted to sound kind, but apparently I did not want it badly enough, so I spelled it out for her, whispering from my side of the bed.

“First I’m going to wait here for you to dump your misery on me, which will no doubt place some kind of blame at my feet, and then I’m going to have trouble falling asleep because I feel a little more like shit than I did before this conversation started.”

She took the upper hand.  “Don’t blame me for how you feel.”

“Ok.  Thanks for the guidance.  Any more advice from Pooh Corner?”

“Yeah, actually,” Claire said.  “Don’t be the asshole who’s already decided on this,” Claire said.

“Ok.  Thanks for the warning.  Consider me hugely undecided.  For all time and forever.”

A short excerpt from a new story.

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There is a long history of people who, without moving a muscle, have fought for their lives.  A person inert in a hospital bed, rigged to bags and lines, is referred to as a fighter.  Upon observation, no visible fight can be detected.  But a will to live is cited in these situations.  The family, gathered at the bed, can detect it.  Even when their loved one dies, they say she fought so hard.  She was such a fighter.  She put up an unbelievable fight.

Such circumstances have always concerned me, and not just tonight, as I wonder about my mother’s resolve to live at least until tomorrow, whether or not her resolve, as discussed, even comes into play.  If I am the patient in the hospital bed, and I am urged, even by a stranger, to fight for my life, will I know how to do it?  It simply is not clear, has never been clear, how exactly one fights for one’s life, with no tools, no weapons, no training, no information at all.  Even the doctors, standing there personally watching me die, will not tell me a thing about what I can do on my own, right now, to extend my life and not succumb to what is killing me.  Why is this information kept secret?  A stranger might cheer me on, exhort me to dig deep and fight—and I say stranger because I did not marry and my brother and sister have passed.  A stranger would, by necessity, attend my bed.  Or no one.  No one is more likely.  Why would a stranger stop in my room, stand at my bed, and exhort me to live?  What kind of stranger does things like that?  And if the answer is a good kind of stranger, I must wonder if it is then my duty, not tonight, because I am busy, but sometime soon, to enter a hospital at night and find a patient alone in his or her room, preferably a patient on the brink of death, and urge them to fight, and fight hard?  I should strive to be a good stranger, is that not correct?  My mother is my family, and if she were able she would attend my bed, and possibly even urge me to fight for my life, although I cannot picture her taking such a command seriously.  It is her stated idea that many things we know and say and feel are ridiculous.  I would think that by the time I am in my hospital bed being urged to fight for my life, my mother will be long dead.  She will have, some time before, fought for her life and lost.  But now, on the brink of death herself, though not today, I don’t think, I fear my mother is similarly in the dark.  If I asked her to fight for her life, assuming a calamity brought her to the hospital, she might politely agree, if she could even speak, but to herself she would be forced to admit that she cannot carry out such an action.  The technique is beyond her.  It has been beyond everyone in our family.  None of us have the skills to fight for our lives.  One by one we pass away.  If the known people of the world were ranked according to their ability to fight for their lives, my family would not do well.

Deleted from an early draft of The Flame Alphabet.

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Before I returned to the car I noticed a fume cupboard at the top of the embankment, one of the old wooden-style medicinal booths.  Up until now I had only heard rumors.  If you drive the northern route they line the highway, vestiges of a short-lived burst of civic health initiatives.  But this was the first one I’d actually seen.  Often they are burned down just days after being erected, and sometimes false fume cupboards are mounted by amateurs, with hacked-up, untested medicines that can kill you if you breathe in any little bit of them.

In a fume cupboard you could bomb yourself with different kinds of healing smoke.  You could dial the oxygen all the way down and get a pure dose of medicine, and even if you fainted the cabinet would be flushed of its chemicals and rich oxygen would get poured in until you revived.

I was keen to try one.

I pried open the lock and entered it for several deep inhalations, cramming my body into the narrow cylinder.  Usually the most potent fumes had long since blown through.  The sanitation department did not regularly recharge these chambers.  But the wooden walls of these units supposedly held smell remnants and if I inhaled with enough force I might pull the sharp medicinal air into my lungs.

I crouched, took a hard suck.  I pressed my face into the blackened wood, mouthed it, then pulled in with all the force I had.  I stepped back and tried rapid, shallow breaths, holding my nose to feel the full force of this treated air.

Nothing came to me, just dust.  It was like standing inside a person’s body, not my own, except it smelled like nothing.

On the inside wall was carved a cluster of graffiti.  I could not readily decipher it, but it looked familiar, something I was sure I once knew.  It was too short in width to be a word, and too complex to be a single letter.  Someone had made this symbol with a knife, and an oily substance had since filled the gouges, blackening the shape.

When I scraped out some of the gunk it was more clear to me.  The graffiti was the whole alphabet superimposed on itself, a tumor of all our letters stacked on top of each other in one stifling clot.  It was as if the entire alphabet had imploded into a single, dark point.

People are pursuing different strategies during the hardship, and yours would seem among the most severe. How long have you advocated the cave?

Advocate is the wrong word. If I occupy a life raft out on the ocean, and people are drowning, I don’t “advocate” the raft to them. I enjoy the raft and my relative security. If the people in the water choose to survive, they will swim to me and petition the raft, and of course I’ll give fair consideration to their request, weighing the relevant factors. In such a case, advocacy of the raft is hardly necessary, and the same is true for what you call the cave.

So you don’t need to promote what people cannot live without?

Right. But even if I hold a deep conviction about survival, particularly during the hardship, our species is too complex for me to assume that everyone wants or needs to survive. There will be people, to follow this life-raft example, who must stay in the water and perish, for reasons peculiar to them, and it’s not my business to probe their motives. Oceans require people to drown in them. That’s not just a line from a popular song. To me it’s beautiful that our survival strategies are wonderfully diverse and not all of us can succeed.

Harper’s subscribers can read more here.

Deleted from an early draft of The Flame Alphabet.

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I woke up on my back.  It was minutes later, it was hours, it was days, I wasn’t sure.  Being sure seemed so optional.  Knowing my circumstances, knowing any circumstances, felt like the folly practiced by others.  Good luck, all you fuckers.  All of that energy spent perceiving, collecting information, knowing.  It was blissful to let it go.  One was freed up for far more important feelings, cut loose of all that.  I did not want to open my eyes.

Above me stood the girl.  She held my ear muffs, the dual yellow orbs reflecting back a strange man—Hello, Father, I wanted to say—and from this girl’s mouth came contortions of sound, a hard and carvable substance.

Had someone shouted into a box and then manipulated sound waves by hand to resemble an awful creature?  Could you do that?  Freeze sound into clay, then build it back up into a person, one of the terrible ones?

I knew this girl from somewhere.  From when I was alive.  This seemed funny to me.  I couldn’t bother to laugh, but if I was alive I would have sat with my friends and laughed with pleasure over this.  A sweet old friend stood over me.  We were together somehow.

From this girl’s mouth came something new.  It was no longer language, but a raw blizzard of sound.  Things are progressing!  She certainly had a gift and I could see why she seemed so excited.  If it did not hurt me so much I would be proud for her.  It wasn’t much of a stretch to root for her, to hope she got what she needed.  I wanted this girl to succeed.  I was close to being happy, the feeling was nearby.  Travel was required.  What a true bother.  The traveler was someone else who I had not managed to become yet.  This girl had come too soon!  I was very scared of what it felt like to know her.  I knew her too early!  Something thick and concentrated flooded the air and this girl was in charge of it.  She had responsibilities!

It was noxious to hear, this sludge from her mouth, and I rolled over with that terrible pressure of the body, the crushing, my gut convulsing.  If only my body was not involved I would be interested in this.  I couldn’t wait to remember it.  I would like to watch this again, but after, I thought.  After.

What I coughed up came so slowly into my throat I thought I would choke on it, but there was a final feeling of release.  I tasted that warm, salty part of me that would leak out when I died.  One just knows this.  My mouth was swimming in something loose and it flowed from my lips down my chin, where it felt soothing and medicinal, spiced with a cooling acid.  I do not even mind this feeling.  I thought, this is what I’d like to use, this liquid.  I’d like to bathe in it, submerse myself.  I will draw more of it forth and collect it.  I needed a plan to get it out of me and into a container somehow.  A bottle of this will go far.

It spilled over the floor, thick and slow, creeping around my face, and as it spread away from me all I could do was reach out and dip my hand in it.  I was proud of myself because I controlled my hand with no help from anyone.  I raised my arm and moved it so my hand could dangle down into the pool.  I let my fingers descend into the liquid and they cooled there.  This was perfect because I could watch them.  I would be in charge of this.  Don’t underestimate me, I wanted to say.

I put my fingers in my mouth, each one salty and cold, and tried to suck this substance back into me, where it belonged.  It was such a bother to complete this work, but it needed to be done.  A little bit of housekeeping.  This was nothing, this liquid, that I wanted to share with anyone ever.  It was none of their business.  I would remove it from sight and everything would be fine, all evidence destroyed.

The girl did not seem angry.

When I licked my fingers she gave me a look that unfortunately I cannot describe.