The Flame Alphabet

The Flame Alphabet
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2012-01-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307957519

In The Flame Alphabet, the most maniacally gifted writer of our generation delivers a novel about how far we will go in order to protect our loved ones. The sound of children's speech has become lethal. In the park, adults wither beneath the powerful screams of their offspring. For young parents Sam and Claire, it seems their only means of survival is to flee from their daughter, Esther. But they find it isn't so easy to leave someone you 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 foreign world to try to save his family.

The Age of Wire and String

The Age of Wire and String
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1998
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781564781963

"A rare, genius-struck achievement . . . filled with great beauties, high themes, enormous sorrows." Kirkus Reviews

C

C
Author: Tom McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage Canada
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2011-09-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307398870

An epochal saga from the acclaimed author of Remainder, C takes place in the early years of the twentieth century and ranges from western England to Europe to North Africa. Serge Carrefax spends his childhood at Versoie House, where his father teaches deaf children to speak when he's not experimenting with wireless telegraphy. Sophie, Serge's sister and only connection to the world at large, takes outrageous liberties with Serge's young body — which may explain the unusual sexual predilections that haunt him for the rest of his life. After recuperating from a mysterious illness at a Bohemian spa, Serge serves in World War I as a radio operator. C culminates in a bizarre scene in an Egyptian catacomb where all Serge's paths and relationships at last converge. Tom McCarthy's mesmerizing, often hilarious accomplishment effortlessly blends the generational breadth of Ian McEwan with the postmodern wit of Thomas Pynchon and marks a writer rapidly becoming one of the most significant and original voices of his generation.

Notes from the Fog

Notes from the Fog
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2018-08-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1783782838

'I wake up and I have to make the right choice,' he said. Master-stylist Ben Marcus returns with a wonder-cabinet of brain-rearranging stories. From the horrifyingly strange to the deeply touching, each story is a literary masterclass unlikely to leave the reader unchanged. From parent/child relationships thrown agonisingly off kilter, to intensely moving scenarios of dependence and emotional crisis; from left-alone bodies to new scientific frontiers, Ben Marcus is the great chronicler of the contemporary uncanny and the peculiar future. Piece by piece, he takes us apart.

Notable American Women

Notable American Women
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2002-03-19
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0375713786

Ben Marcus achieved cult status and gained the admiration of his peers with his first book, The Age of Wire and String. With Notable American Women he goes well beyond that first achievement to create something radically wonderful, a novel set in a world so fully imagined that it creates its own reality. On a farm in Ohio, American women led by Jane Dark practice all means of behavior modification in an attempt to attain complete stillness and silence. Witnessing (and subjected to) their cultish actions is one Ben Marcus, whose father, Michael Marcus, may be buried in the back yard, and whose mother, Jane Marcus, enthusiastically condones the use of her son for (generally unsuccessful) breeding purposes, among other things. Inventing his own uses for language, the author Ben Marcus has written a harrowing, hilarious, strangely moving, altogether engrossing work of fiction that will be read and argued over for years to come.

New American Stories

New American Stories
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 778
Release: 2015-07-21
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804173540

In New American Stories, the beautiful, the strange, the melancholy, and the sublime all comingle to show the vast range of the American short story . In this remarkable anthology, Ben Marcus has corralled a vital and artistically singular crowd of contemporary fiction writers. Collected here are practitioners of deep realism, mind-blowing experimentalism, and every hybrid in between. Luminaries and cult authors stand side by side with the most compelling new literary voices. Nothing less than the American short story renaissance distilled down to its most relevant, daring, and unforgettable works, New American Stories puts on wide display the true art of an American idiom.

Keepers of the Flame

Keepers of the Flame
Author: Ian Hamilton
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2011-08-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0571281680

Literary biography is an endlessly fascinating form, not least because of the fierce controversies that attend the question of how much of a writer's real life ought to be related to readers. Ian Hamilton, a first-rate biographer who encountering his share of adversity in writing the life of J.D. Salinger, is the perfect chronicler of such controversies in this brilliant study, first published in 1992, which charts the course of literary biography from Donne and Shakespeare to Plath and Larkin.'Such a compelling read.' Antonia Fraser, Times'Lively and informative, powerfully and humorously written.' Anthony Burgess, Observer'Surely the funniest book ever written on the doom-laden issue of posthumous literary fame.' Jonathan Keates, Independent

Leaving the Sea

Leaving the Sea
Author: Ben Marcus
Publisher: Granta Books
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2014-01-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1847086373

A bold new short story collection from one of the most exhilarating and innovative writers of our time. The stories in Leaving the Sea take place in a world which is a distortion of our own, where strange illnesses strike at random and where people disappear without a trace. Ben Marcus has created a labyrinth populated by disturbed, weary men; from the frustrated creative writing teacher to the advocate of self-inhumation; from Paul, whose return home leads him further into his isolation, or Mather, whose child is sick, to an unnamed narrator who spends his lonely evenings calculating the probabilities of his mother's imminent demise. Dark, funny and utterly unique, Leaving the Sea showcases a writer at the height of his powers.

Mongrels or Marvels

Mongrels or Marvels
Author: Deborah A. Starr
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2011-05-17
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0804777888

The writings of Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff (1917–1979) offer a refreshing reassessment of Arab-Jewish relations in the Middle East. A member of the bourgeois Jewish community in Cairo, Kahanoff grew up in a time of coexistence. She spent the years of World War II in New York City, where she launched her writing career with publications in prominent American journals. Kahanoff later settled in Israel, where she became a noted cultural and literary critic. Mongrels or Marvels offers Kahanoff's most influential and engaging writings, selected from essays and works of fiction that anticipate contemporary concerns about cultural integration in immigrant societies. Confronted with the breakdown of cosmopolitan Egyptian society, and the stereotypes she encountered as a Jew from the Arab world, she developed a social model, Levantinism, that embraces the idea of a pluralist, multicultural society and counters the prevailing attitudes and identity politics in the Middle East with the possibility of mutual respect and acceptance.

The Door Into Fire

The Door Into Fire
Author: Diane Duane
Publisher: Diane Duane
Total Pages: 309
Release: 1979-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

A sorcerous swordsmith desperate to achieve true power. His stubbornly nonmagical sword. His princely runaway lover. His hungry new fire elemental. Put them all together, and what can possibly go wrong?... Herewiss is the only man in centuries to possess the Power of the blue Flame, but he can’t use or control it — not even to help his friend and lover Freelorn, prince of Arlen, banished from his native land and pursued across the Middle Kingdoms by the usurpers' allies. Invoking perilous sorceries and the even more dangerous assistance of the fire elemental Sunspark, Herewiss manages to free Freelorn and his little band of followers from their pursuers. Together they flee eastward to seek brief refuge in the mysterious lands near the edge of the world they know. But now Herewiss faces a devastating choice. His time to master the blue Fire is running out. Should he abandon his fruitless search and join Freelorn in his fight to regain his kingdom? Or should he seek out the ancient keep in the Waste where countless doors lead into other worlds—among them, perhaps, the door that when opened will show Herewiss how to break through into the Power he must master or die?... The Door Into Fire, first novel set in Diane Duane's award-winning Middle Kingdoms universe, opens a fantastic saga of magic, adventure and love that has become a cult classic for its uniquely inclusive take on epic fantasy and its unforgettable characters. "Good strong stuff with the right light touch." (Terry Pratchett) "Expands the limits of the swords and sorcery genre. Exciting, magical, intelligent." (Publishers Weekly)