Languages on the internet: The keenest Wikipedians. Fiction Review: The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus. Knopf, $25.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-307-37937-5. Language kills in Marcus’s audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness. Outside Rochester, N.Y., Sam and Claire are a normal Jewish couple with a sullen teenage daughter, Esther. But Esther and other Jewish children begin to speak a toxic form of language, potentially deadly to adults: with “the Esther toxicity... in high flower,” Sam watches in horror as the disease spreads to children of other religions, quarantine zones are imposed, and Claire sickens to the point of death.
Heeding the advice of enigmatic prophet LeBov, Sam manufactures his own homemade defenses against his daughter’s speech. But he and Claire are soon forced to abandon Esther in order to save themselves. The novel’s first part plays like The Twilight Zone as a normal community becomes exposed to this mysterious infection. The Flame Alphabet « Ben Marcus. By Ben Marcus The Flame Alphabet was published by Knopf in January 2012.
Some reviews: “Marcus is a writer of prodigious talent . . . Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic . . . [ The Flame Alphabet ] reads like a dream.” “An apocalyptic nightmare. “Incandescent . . . “Language kills in Marcus’s audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form of illness . . . “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.
. “ The Flame Alphabet drags the contemporary novel—kicking, screaming, and foaming at the mouth—back towards the track it should be following. “Ben Marcus is the rarest kind of writer: a necessary one. From the dust jacket: Purchase The Flame Alphabet: Amazon.co. In Ben Marcus' recent article in Harpers was a cynical, albeit realistic view on the publishing world. He said, basically: most people are stupid and read stupid books. Of course, the rhetoric was veiled. His claim was that the public wasn't interested in new concepts and forms of literature, that they only wanted the linear character driven mini-sagas of social realist novel.
He went on to deride Jonathan Franzen's Corrections. It is not surprising (if anything, it is only fitting) that Marcus appoints himself the spokesperson of `avante garde' fiction, for his work is truly experimental. In `The Age of Wire and String', Marcus weaves together utterly strange, almost indecipherable, `stories.' Likely counterparts are Pynchon, Kafka, Calvino, Borges, D.F. Ben Marcus' uniquely original writing (along with his publishing world rants) might make him seem like a snob, but when you're that smart, how could you not be? Mendelsund. Michel Foucault, Archaeology Of Knowledge, Introduction. Introduction For many years now historians have preferred to turn their attention to long periods, as if, beneath the shifts and changes of political events, they were trying to reveal the stable, almost indestructible system of checks and balances, the irreversible processes, the constant readjustments, the underlying tendencies that gather force, and are then suddenly reversed after centuries of continuity, the movements of accumulation and slow saturation, the great silent, motionless bases that traditional history has covered with a thick layer of events.
The tools that enable historians to carry out this work of analysis are partly inherited and partly of their own making: models of economic growth, quantitative analysis of market movements, accounts of demographic expansion and contraction, the study of climate and its long-term changes, the fixing of sociological constants, the description of technological adjustments and of their spread and continuity.
Language is a Virus. Through the Language Glass - GuyDeutscher. Through the Language Glass How Words Colour Your World by Guy Deutscher Shortlisted for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, 2011 An Economist Best Book of 2010 Editor’s Choice, New York Times A Spectator Best Book of 2010 A Financial Times Best Book of 2010 A Library Journal Best Book of 2010 Winner of 'Best Science Book, 2010' prize (Vienna) (Translations rights have been sold in: Spanish, German, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Serbian, Croatian, Dutch, Italian, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (complex), Russian Praise A marvellous and surprising book which left me breathless and dizzy with delight.
Our most basic assumptions are called into question in this rich and provocative look at how language affects the way we see the world... A book so robustly researched and wonderfully told that it is hard to put down. Brilliant account of linguistic research. A thrilling and challenging ride. " Fascinating Study of the way every langauge divides the world into its own unique jigsaw. Steven Pinker on language and thought.