The Flame Alphabet

Resumen del libro

The speech of children has mutated into a virus which is killing their parents. At first it only affects Jews-then everyone. Living quietly in the suburbs, Sam and Claire's lives are threatened when their daughter, Esther, is infected with the disease. Each word she speaks - whether cruel or kind, banal or loving - is toxic to Sam and Claire. Radio transmissions from strange sources indicate that people across the country are growing increasingly alarmed. But all Sam needs to do is look around the neighborhood: in the park, parents wither beneath the powerful screams of their children. Claire is already stricken and near death. As the contagion spreads, Sam and Claire must leave Esther behind in order to survive. The government enforces quarantine zones, and return to their daughter becomes impossible. Having left his family and escaped from the afflicted cities, Sam finds himself in a government laboratory, where a group of hardened scientists are conducting horrific tests, hoping to create non-lethal speech. What follows is a nightmarish vision of a world which is both completely alien and frighteningly familiar, as Sam presses on alone into a society whose boundaries are fragmenting. Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, The Flame Alphabet begs the question: what is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love?

Biografía del autor

Ben Marcus (Chicago, 1967) es escritor y profesor en la Universidad de Columbia. Ha publicado dos novelas, Norteamericanas ilustres (2002) y El alfabeto de fuego (2012; Catedral, 2017), y tres colecciones de relatos, The Age of Wire and String (1997), Leaving the Sea (2014) y Notes from the Fog (2018). Entre sus ensayos se encuentra Por qué la literatura experimental amenaza con destruir la edición, a Jonathan Franzen y la vida tal y como la conocemos (2005; Jekyll x{0026}amp; Jill, 2019), en respuesta al artículo Mr. Difficult. William Gaddis and the problem of hard-to-read books , de Jonathan Franzen. En 2004 editó la antología The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories y en 2015 otra antología, New American Stories. Sus relatos han aparecido en Harperx{0026} x02019;s, The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, McSweeneyx{0026} x02019;s, Tin House o Conjunctions.