Description: "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." -Fiona Maazel, Book Forum "Incandescent . . . [The] apocalyptical plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus' blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization." -Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review) "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) " 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 "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 our world-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

Please Wait