Nothing (39 page)
Authors: Blake Butler
194
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Ziggurat_of_Ur.
195
http://wrongwaywizard.blogspot.com/2008/10/bore-me-again-o-wrong-way-wizard.html.
196
http://www.wendi.com/html/insomnia1.html.
197
Any of the said links too, perhaps by the time of being read wherever, having turned up dead, leading instead to error fields or flats of white.
198
http://gizmodo.com/5422324/each-american-consumes-34gb-of-data-a-day.
199
Morin, 112.
200
From a definition of the word
relief
(http://www.definitions.net/definition/relief).
201
http://www.weirdasianews.com/2010/10/01/chinese-suicide-interrupted-sleep.
Blake Butler
is the author of the novel
There Is No Year
, the novella
Ever
, and the novel-in-stories
Scorch Atlas
, named Novel of the Year by
3:AM Magazine
. He edits
HTMLGiant
, “the internet literature magazine blog of the future,” as well as two journals of innovative text,
Lamination Colony
and
No Colony
. His writing has appeared widely online and in print, including in
The Believer
,
Unsaid
,
Fence
, and
Vice,
and has been short-listed in
The
Best American Nonrequired Reading
. Butler lives in Atlanta and blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Praise for
There Is No Year
by Blake Butler
“Deeply honest and emotional, a family drama that by its end brings on feelings as complex and satisfying as those summoned by Faulkner’s simple sentence ‘They endured.’ . . . This novel is a thing of such strange beauty [that it yields] the rewards that only well-made art can provide.”
—Joseph Salvatore,
New York Times Book Review
(Editor’s Choice)
“There is no novel like Blake Butler’s
There Is No Year
. . . . Butler’s prose is persistent and perfected, and he’s able to sustain the shape-shifting narrative for four hundred pages. His sense of humanity bleeds through the jagged edges, and by the end you’ve fallen for this nameless, deteriorating family, hoping it will survive. . . . Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.”
—Tucker Shaw,
Denver Post
“A smoke signal on the horizon of the American literary landscape. . . . [As] if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack. . . . [Butler’s prose offers] ecstatic pleasures. . . . It bursts and cracks with inventions and constructions.”
—Wyatt Williams,
Creative Loafing
“An experimental prose-poem [that] pushes the boundaries of the novel. . . . Calling Blake Butler’s
There Is No Year
a novel is akin to calling René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images a pipe; both works subtly expand the framework of their respective disciplines by challenging an audience that has solidified its expectations after centuries of familiarity and repetition. . . . Butler seems to be making a statement that the novel, as an art form, needs to start tearing down walls and moving in new directions if it is going to survive. [In doing so,] it helps to illuminate a path toward more liberated forms of artistic expression.”
—Josh Davis,
Time Out New York
(four stars)
“Butler’s sentences are frequently dizzying and poetic, and gathered in engrossing vignette-like sections. . . . A challenging, Dalí-esque spin on the horror genre, a postmodern playground . . .
There Is No Year
is also often funny and insightful, further proof of Butler’s impressive and innovative talents.”
—Jonathan Fullmer,
Time Out Chicago
“Dystopian and sinister.”
—
Nylon
“Hypnotic, incantatory.”
—
The Rumpus
“Wild [and] poetic.”
—
Time Out New York
“All words normally used to craft literary reviews fail. This is an entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader. The novel is like a 4G version of fiction, if you will. . . . There are also all the elements of a more traditional book, with fully developed characters, mystery, and movement that readers enjoy—and an evocative narrative voice sustained for four hundred pages. Butler takes his ingredients and renders them into a dreamlike whorl, a highly stylized read that serves quite well as a metaphor for our new digital age. And like the best of dreams,
There Is No Year
also sticks in the brain long after the book is set down.”
—
The Atlantan
“An innovative masterpiece. . . . A haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.”
—Gina Angelotti,
Metro
“Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power.”
—Ben Marcus
“Butler writes about domesticity with a startling, ruthless truthfulness, absurd and deadpan in one breath. . . . [The result] feels unlike anything else being written. Butler has been a powerful force in contemporary literature for the past four years, [and]
There Is No Year
provides further proof that his own fiction is about the most breathtaking and exciting that’s out there.”
—Colin Herd,
3:AM Magazine
“An acid burn of a lucid nightmare. . . . Accessible, rewarding, and engaging. . . . Undeniably worth the effort.”
—Candra Kolodziej,
The Stranger
“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn’t. I’ve literally lost sleep imagining the fallout when
There Is No Year
drops and American fiction shifts its axis.”
—Dennis Cooper
“An artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature. . . . The distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis.”
—
Library Journal
“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“[Butler’s work is] wild but elegant and smart. . . . [It] demands to be read.”
—Roxane Gay,
The Rumpus
There Is No Year
Scorch Atlas
Ever
Cover design by Milan Bozic
NOTHING. Copyright © 2011 by Blake Butler. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Designed by Justin Dodd
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-0-06-199738-9
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062101570
11 12 13 14 15 OV
/
RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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