Communication poisons the air. And to prove it, Marcus just keeps writing. "The Flame Alphabet" is one part inspiring and two parts infuriating. Samuel and Claire are part of a Jewish cult that is ...

But what if all that toxic language was, well, actually toxic? That's the premise of The Flame Alphabet, the new novel by Ben Marcus. When Sam and his wife begin feeling sick, they're not sure why.

Taking the idea a few steps further, author Ben Marcus imagines a world in which language becomes fatal in “The Flame Alphabet,” a powerfully strange and frequently disturbing work that ...

Many a reader is bound to balk at the premise of Ben Marcus's second novel, "The Flame Alphabet": In a United States bearing a vague similarity to the real thing, the speech of children kills adults.

From that opening line in Ben Marcus’ new novel focusing on a mysterious pandemic, “The Flame Alphabet” (Knopf, 304 pp., $25.95), we are led to believe this is a story about abandonment.

If you lived in the world of “The Flame Alphabet,” this book review could kill you. The novel opens in the midst of a language apocalypse, in which parents fall deathly ill from the speech of ...

Ben Marcus' bracing 2012 novel The Flame Alphabet (Knopf) makes high, messy art from the fantastic. His premise — that the language of children suddenly is toxic to adults — has an immediate power but ...

Near the end of The Flame Alphabet, Ben Marcus's rhapsodic apocalyptic novel of a world where language has become toxic, Sam, the narrator, commenting on a fable of a young bird blindfolded as a ...