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The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus audiobook

The Flame Alphabet

By Ben Marcus
Read by Andy Paris

Recorded Books, Recorded Books, Inc.
11.12 Hours • Unabridged
Format : CD (In Stock)
  • 2 Formats: CD
  • 2 Formats: MP3 CD

  • Regular Price: $49.99

    Special Price $39.99

    ISBN: 9781664407114

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    ISBN: 9781664662445

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Ben Marcus has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking fiction, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. In The Flame Alphabet, Marcus creates a chilling world where the speech of children is killing their parents. After being forced to leave their daughter Esther to fend for herself, Sam and Claire end up at a government lab intent on creating non-lethal speech. But when Sam discovers the truth about what's going on there, he realizes reuniting with his daughter is the only way to keep his sanity.

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Summary

Summary

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, January2012

Ben Marcus has received numerous awards for his groundbreaking fiction, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and three Pushcart Prizes. In The Flame Alphabet, Marcus creates a chilling world where the speech of children is killing their parents. After being forced to leave their daughter Esther to fend for herself, Sam and Claire end up at a government lab intent on creating non-lethal speech. But when Sam discovers the truth about what's going on there, he realizes reuniting with his daughter is the only way to keep his sanity.

Editorial Reviews

Editorial Reviews

“Powerfully strange and frequently disturbing…It’s a rich testament to Marcus’ gifts that in a story about the death of language, his words frequently come together in ways to be savored.” —Los Angeles Times
“[Marcus is] giving his highfalutin concepts the thriller treatment…A brutal, wonderful book, streaking with the sickly brown and gray hues of Philip K. Dick and David Cronenberg.” —AV Club
“Language kills in Marcus’ audacious new work of fiction, a richly allusive look at a world transformed by a new form illness…Biblical in its Old Testament sense of wrath, Marcus’ novel twists America’s quotidian existence into something recognizable yet wholly alien to our experience.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“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,…apocalyptic plot serves as a vehicle for Marcus’ blazing metaphysical inquiry into expression, meaning, self, love, and civilization.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Narrator Andy Paris’ gentle voice dampens the horror of the words. yet his delivery is pitch-perfect, giving the feeling that hysteria is just moments away. The book is fascinating discourse on a bizarre situation that forces listeners to confront all their beliefs and suppositions.” —AudioFile
“Fierce, scary, hurtful, unsettling, and brilliant, this new work by award-winning novelist Marcus reminds us that language is dangerous and that we’ll do anything to protect our children, even when they are (literally) killing us.” —Library Journal

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Author

Author Bio: Ben Marcus

Author Bio: Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is the author of The Flame Alphabet, Notable American Women, The Father Costume, and The Age of Wire and String. His writing has been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Salon, McSweeney’s, the Paris Review, Harper’s, and others. He is the editor of The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories and has served as the guest editor of Guernica magazine. He is a 2009 recipient of a grant for Innovative Literature from the Creative Capital Foundation and has also received the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, the Whiting Writers Award, and three Pushcart Prizes. Marcus is a former professor at Brown University and is now a faculty member at Columbia University’s School of the Arts.

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Details

Details

Available Formats : CD, MP3 CD
Runtime: 11.12
Audience: Adult
Language: English

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