“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.

iBookstore

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.

When Sam and his wife begin feeling sick, they’re not sure why. But when their teenage daughter, Esther, leaves the house, the couple recovers. The horrifying prospect dawns on them that their daughter — specifically, her speech — is poisoning them. Soon it becomes clear that the sickness is spreading beyond their small Jewish community.

Listen to the interview.

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. The language conflict in this book lies not in the telling, but in the story itself, a nightmarish tale of parents who are made ill from the speech of their teenage daughter. It’s a simple premise, but when the language toxicity strikes, the book’s world quickly turns dystopic, with sinister Jewish sects and Cronenbergian biotechnologies hiding in every corner.

Read the interview.

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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Feb 15
The Sky Room at the New Museum, 7:00 p.m.
Bookforum Reading
The New Museum
235 Bowery (Between Prince & Stanton)
New York, NY 10002
Map

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Feb 21
The College of New Jersey, 4:00 p.m.
2000 Pennington Road
Ewing, NJ 08628
Map

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Feb 26
JCC of San Francisco, 1 p.m.
Jewish BookFest Panel with Adam Levin (Hot Pink) and Peter Orner (Love and Shame and Love), moderated by Dan Schifrin of the Contemporary Jewish Museum
3200 California Street
San Francisco, CA 94118
Map

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March 1
Brown University, 2:30 p.m.
McCormack Family Theater
70 Brown St.
Providence, RI 02912
Map

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March 4
Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2:30 p.m.
36 Battery Place
New York, NY 10004
Map

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March 8
St. Francis College, 4:30 p.m.
Maroney Theater
180 Remsen Street (Between Clinton and Court St.)
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Map

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March 12
Housing Works, 7:00 p.m.
With Diane Williams and Deb Olin Unferth
126 Crosby Street
New York, NY
Map

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March 21
Syracuse University, 5:30 p.m.
Huntington Beard Crouse Hall, Gifford Auditorium
Syracuse, NY 13244
Map

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March 27
Spoken Interludes, at Riverview, 7:30 p.m.
One Warburton Avenue
Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706
Map

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April 4
Happy Ending Reading Series, Doors at 6:00, Show at 7:00 p.m.
With Sarah Manguso
Tickets, $15
Joe’s Pub
425 Lafayette Street
New York, NY 10003
Map

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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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Amazon Best Books of the Month, January 2012:

From the dark, curious imagination of Ben Marcus comes another brain melter of a novel. The Flame Alphabet has a pandemic premise–children are slowly killing their parents by speaking–and only gets stranger and smarter from there. When Sam leaves his decaying family behind to seek a cure for his daughter’s lethal condition, he winds up in a government think tank that casually eliminates human subjects in its quest for an antidote. Stories don’t get much more horrifying than this, but Marcus’s absorbing, conversational style makes his twisted bildungsroman as difficult to put down as it is to accept. In an unimaginable situation, Sam takes the only steps that seem possible: He submits, he works, he dreams of his wife and child. This cruel, insightful meditation on societal dysfunction and individual resilience comes from a mind that must be appreciated, even if you find yourself relieved that it’s not your own. –Mia Lipman

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

	The City University of New York City College Mathematics Department NAC 6-291C New York, NY 10031 mbmarcus@optonline.net

Professor, Mathematics Department

B.S., Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, 1957

MS., Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1958

Ph.D., Mathematics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1965

Research interests: Probability, Analysis

• Publications: (2000-2011)
• Publications: (1991-1999)
• Publications: (1981-1990)
• Publications prior to 1981

Probability Seminar Web Site

Markov processes, Gaussian processes and local time, published Oct. 2006