Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Books.

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without Goose to Bird?

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very excited to talk to Ben Marcus, the author of The Flame Alphabet.

It's published by Knapp. Ben, now tell me, this book

seemed to me to be a very frightening book and willing to be repellent. In it, language itself, particularly the language spoken by children

to their parents. And maybe it is true right now that the young speak a language that parents

cannot understand, or maybe better still, that the young speak a language that parents cannot understand, or maybe better still, that the young

speak a language that novelists and readers can't understand, but somehow the young don't want

what we want, and what they have to say pains and frightens us. And in this book,

that pain and that fright is real, is physical, is a disease. The older people are diseased

because of the language the younger people speak.

Tell me a little about that.

Where does that come from?

It's an amplification of something I think is already true,

and I wouldn't even just say that the young speak a language that we find frightening,

but that we all do. And as the book develops,

it is really not just the language of children that is the culprit, but all language. And

somebody in the book, a villain says, what made us ever think we could consume as much of this

...