Synopses & Reviews
"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." —
Time Out New York"[Butler's] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there's a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." —Flavorpill
With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony ONeill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewskis House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”
Review
"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." Time Out Chicago
Review
"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, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life." Ben Marcus
Review
"An entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader....Like a 4G version of fiction[,] 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
Review
"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
Review
"[An] innovative masterpiece...a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe." Gina Angelotti, Metro
Review
"This artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature is recommended for contemporary literature fans looking for something out of the ordinary. Recommended for students of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as the distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis." Library Journal
Review
"An acid burn of a lucid nightmare...accessible, rewarding, and engaging....There Is No Year can be hard as hell to read, but it's also undeniably worth the effort." Candra Kolodziej, The Stranger
Review
"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." New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
Review
"There is no novel like There Is No Year....Butler's prose is persistent and perfected....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
Review
"Dystopian and sinister....In There Is No Year, Butler subverts our understanding of family relations, rendering domestic tragedy as both familiar and strange." Nylon Magazine
Review
"If the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring." Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Review
"A wild, poetic work." Time Out New York
Review
“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.” Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . an] inventive and deeply promising young author." --Time Out New York
" Butler's] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there's a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." --Flavorpill
With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O'Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, "if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring."
Synopsis
With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony ONeill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewskis House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family.
Synopsis
A family of three: father, mother, son.
A house that gives them shelter but shapes their nightmares.
An illness that nearly arrested the past, and looms over the future.
A second family a copy family. Mirror bodies.
Events on the horizon: a hole, a box, a light, a girl.
Holes in houses. Holes in speaking. Holes in flesh.
Memories that deceive and figures that tempt and lure and withdraw.
There Is No Year is the astonishing new novel by Blake Butler.
It is a world of scare, a portrait of return, a fable of survival and the fierce burden of art.
About the Author
Blake Butler is the author of five books of fiction, including There Is No Year and Scorch Atlas; a work of hybrid nonfiction, Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia; and two collaborative works, Anatomy Courses with Sean Kilpatrick and One with Vanessa Place and Christopher Higgs. He is the founding editor of HTMLGIANT, "the Internet literature magazine blog of the future," and maintains a weekly column covering literary art and fast food for Vice magazine. His other work has appeared widely, including in The Believer, the New York Times, Fence, Dazed and Confused, and The Best Bizarro Fiction of the Decade. He lives in Atlanta.