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The Flame Alphabet
Ben Marcus
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Description for The Flame Alphabet
Paperback. In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a work of heartbreak and horror, a novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families Num Pages: 304 pages. BIC Classification: FA. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 197 x 134 x 23. Weight in Grams: 210.
A terrible epidemic has struck the country and the sound of children's speech has become lethal. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people are going into hiding. All Sam and Claire need to do is look around the neighbourhood: In the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. At night, suburban side streets become routes of shameful escape for fathers trying to get outside the radius of affliction. With Claire nearing collapse, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther, who laughs at her parents' sickness, unaware that in ... Read morejust a few years she, too, will be susceptible to the language toxicity. But Sam and Claire find it isn't so easy to leave the daughter they still love, even as they waste away from her malevolent speech. On the eve of their departure, Claire mysteriously disappears, and Sam, determined to find a cure for this new toxic language, presses on alone into a world beyond recognition. The Flame Alphabet invites the question: what is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus's position in the first rank of American novelists. Show Less
Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About Ben Marcus
BEN MARCUS is the author of The Age of Wire and String, Notable American Women, The Flame Alphabet and Leaving the Sea. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Granta, Harper's and the Paris Review. Marcus has received a Whiting Writers' Award, a Berlin Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on the faculty at Columbia University in New ... Read moreYork. Show Less
Reviews for The Flame Alphabet
The Flame Alphabet drags the contemporary novel kicking, screaming, and foaming at the mouth back towards the track it should be following
Tom McCarthy A genuinely new thing in an age of recycling. Is the novel history? Not while people like this are still taking risks on it
Tim Martin, Books of the Year
Daily ... Read moreTelegraph
One of the most powerful works of fiction I have ever read... a revelation and a castigation
Stuart Kelly
Scotsman
One of our most audacious and inventive writers catches fire in this thrillingly subversive book
Vanity Fair
What I found fascinating about this book, after its remarkable premise, and the cold beauty of its prose, was my own reaction to it. I can put it no better than to say that this book got to me... A masterpiece
Nick Lezard
Guardian
Marcus has created a disorientating masterpiece. You'll never look at words in quite the same way again
Financial Times
Marcus is the rarest kind of writer: a necessary one. It's become impossible to imagine the literary world without his daring, mind-bending and heartbreaking writing
Jonathan Safran Foer 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 out of which the sanely insane genius of Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. Feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of a classic
Michael Chabon The most unsettling novel of the year... It looks from a distance like a sci-fi dystopia but is, in fact, far more interesting than that
Nicholas Lezard, Books of the Year
Guardian
A story with the potential to wound, to shock, and to horrify
Adam Langer
Boston Globe
I want the English language to do things it hasn't done before, and I want American fiction to do things it hasn't done before, and I want to be in a state of arrest at the moment of gazing upon a page of text, and Marcus is one of those very few writers who can do that
Rick Moody Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic ... The Flame Alphabet has the feel of an event
New York Times Book Review
Larded with creepy metaphors, the author's own wayward language destabilises the reader's sense of linguistic propriety
Independent
Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language.... His [stories] can enchant and wreck your mind
Jonathan Lethem An authentic meditation on the sacred cruelty of communication that will leave his readers speechless
San Francisco Chronicle
I assure you that Marcus' chilling vision will haunt you long after his novel ends
Haaretz
Strange and moving and endlessly fascinating, this novel is yet another of Marcus's wicked triumphs
Flavorwire
To people who just want to read a good yarn and who think Ben Marcus is too weird for them, I'd say: Think again . . . The novel can operate on multiple registers: as metaphor, sociology, conventional thriller, and, at bottom, discourse on parenthood and family that is freakishly sad and incredibly good
Bookforum
What Marcus has done, very successfully, is create a mechanical world that has the quality of a nightmare or inescapable hallucination: it is as if he has superimposed another layer of reality upon our own
Philip Womack
New Humanist
An engrossing story that is both an intelligent exploration of what is left of life when verbal communication breaks down, and a thrilling story about survival at all costs
Evening Chronicle
A sci-fi disaster-movie plot with a determinedly cerebral twist. Marcus offers a vividly realised dystopia, and it's an impressive feat of imagination (and, of course, language)... jump in if you want your brain stimulated
Cathy Dillon
Irish Times
The Flame Alphabet's magic is its unsettling otherness, its weird beauty, the energising effects of its associative power
David Annand
Literary Review
It's wickedly funny, but also a brilliant, eccentric horror story
Kate Saunders
The Times
Brilliant and disorientating
George Pendle
Financial Times
Part-fairy tale, part-horror story, part-literary dissection of these: a mutant worthy of the best experimenters
Jonathan Gibbs
Independent
A thoughtfully written, clever tale
Lesley McDowell
Sunday Herald
Gets into your head and under your skin and stays there
Josh Cohen, Books of the Year
Big Issue
A terrifying modernist masterpiece
Guardian
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