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The Flame Alphabet

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The Flame Alphabet

Written by: Ben Marcus
Narrated by: Andy Paris
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About this listen

In The Flame Alphabet, language is toxic to everyone but children. For adults this means no speaking, no reading, no writing, no listening - at least not without severe allergic reaction, depression or crippling pain. In telling the story, Sam, a man whose family has come apart, is literally dying a slow death. It’s poisoning him to write the words that we read. The story is set in our time, but that time has been just slightly broken open to accommodate a world where children have all of the power and where adults must shield themselves from language in any way that they can. Marcus’s narrative touches on a wide range of interests and issues, including a speculative conception of allergy science, rogue tactics of self-improvement, the trauma that surrounds aphasia, confidence games between excessively powerful children, the future of writing as a technology and cruelty within families. The novel is part satire and lament, dystopian fantasy and family tragedy.

©2012 Ben Marcus (P)2012 Recorded Books, LLC Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction Witty Tearjerking

What the critics say

“Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent . . . Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic . . . [ The Flame Alphabet] reads like a dream.” (J. Robert Lennon, The New York Times Book 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)
“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)

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