“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.

“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.

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.

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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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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 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

Booklist Issue: December 15, 2011

Featured Guest Review: Jonathan Lethem on The Flame Alphabet

Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language. We already knew this, from the outrageous stories, and from Notable American Women. When I call him an “inventor,” I’m seeking a little working distance from the bland (and often dismissive) term “experimental”–for if Marcus is conducting experiments, he’s conducting them out of view, and then unveiling the results as a fait accompli, like an Edison or Tesla or some other secular magician emerging from a laboratory. Marcus’s work, with its powerful kinship to the visual arts and music and perhaps even pharmacology, should less be copyrighted than patented. His devices can enchant and wreck your mind. Like I say, we already knew this.

What we didn’t know, and I suppose possibly he didn’t either until he blew the wrought-iron clawfeet off his own prototype and replaced them with white-walls and a souped-up engine, is how thrilling it would be to see Marcus apply his gifts to something closer to traditional narrative. I say that as if it’s some drab operation (“apply” and “traditional”) but in fact what The Flame Alphabet has done is open up a kind of wide-screen view of the sort of crazy Ben Marcus movie that was likely always playing in his brain but which he has now taken out for wide release.

It appears that all the giddy anxiety and sorrowful vertigo of Marcus’s language was only the leading edge of an implicit sense of pure story, the kind where figures in a landscape struggle to negotiate outrageous danger, loss and mystery. The book is an urban ironist’s reply to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, yet in a way I think it is braver and more wrenching even than McCarthy’s book (as well as, as you’d expect, more peculiar and funny, and less infused with wearisome machismo) because of the greater degree of complicity it admits, complicity with the disasters that flow through our collective world but are also locatable in each and every one of us if we’re ready to meet them there.

The Flame Alphabet explodes with human drama without for one single line relinquishing Marcus’s lifelong commitment to the drama of a sentence making itself known on the page. In fact, and this is surely the most brilliant thing about the book, it fuses those two notions of drama into one immutable and bizarre whole. That’s what’s known in show business as a spoiler, but I couldn’t resist.

Read the review on Amazon.com.