Books like The Flame Alphabet

Ben Marcus (born October 11, 1967) is an American author and professor at Columbia University. He has written four books of fiction. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in publications including Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, The New York Times, GQ, Salon, McSweeney's, Time, and Conjunctions. He is also the fiction editor of The American Reader. His latest book, Notes From The Fog: Stories, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in August 2018.

Marcus grew up in Austin, the son of a retired mathematician and the literary critic and Virginia Woolf scholar Jane Marcus. He received his bachelor's degree in philosophy from New York University and an MFA from Brown University. His father is Jewish and his mother is of Irish Catholic background; Marcus had a Bar Mitzvah. Marcus also has two kids, Delia and Solomon, born in 2004 and 2008.