“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn’t.” —Dennis Cooper From Blake Butler, one of the most challenging young writers of our time and the acclaimed author of the novel There Is No Year, comes a thrillingly wide-ranging and provocative book about insomnia—from its role in history, art, and science through its unexpected consequences on Butler’s personal imagination, creative process, and perspective on reality. Fans of David Foster Wallace, David Shields, and Dennis Cooper will be captivated by Blake Butler’s darkly evocative prose and his daring exploration of the challenges of consciousness.

Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

Biographies & Memoirs

Butler, Blake

Arts & Literature

Harper-perennial

"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.”

There Is No Year: A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

An unforgettable novel of an American suburb devastated by a fiendish madman—the most ambitious and important work yet by “the 21st century answer to William Burroughs” (Publishers Weekly).
Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind.
A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metal head followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis.
A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.

Three Hundred Million

Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Refinery29 A hypnotic, wildly inventive novel about art, violence, and endurance Alice Knott lives alone, a reclusive heiress haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious near-identical brother. Much of her family's fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find the artwork destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow and the world's most priceless works of art are destroyed one by one, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy--even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder. Unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well as a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose trials feel both apocalyptic and universal.

Alice Knott: A Novel

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Riverhead Books

In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we’ve become. In The Disappeared,” a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents’ ransacked attic in The Ruined Child.” Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler’s full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

Scorch Atlas

Featherproof Books

Fiction. "Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect"--Brian Evenson. "Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality"--Gary Lutz. "In EVER--as in, indicating any time in the past or future--light is entropic; 'the sky could lift your skin off'; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks granting 'no exit method'; and doors won't open even when you don't try..."--Miranda Mellis.

EVER

Contemporary

Calamari Press

Magazine. Fiction. Edited by Gary Lutz and Derek White, SLEEPINGFISH 8 features fictional text objects by: Ryan Call, Anna DeForest, Sasha Fletcher, Nina Shope, Rachel May, David McLendon, Eugene Lim, The Brothers Goat, Lito Elio Porto, Adam Weinstein, Diane Williams, Dennis Cooper, Elliott Stevens, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Alec Niedenthal, Amelia Gray, Matt Bell, Eduardo Recife, David Ohle, Evelyn Hampton, Emilie Noteris, Ottessa Moshfegh, Cooper Renner, Christine Schutt, M.T. Fallon, Daniel Grandbois, Julie Doxsee, Terese Svoboda, Blake Butler, Stephen Gropp-Hess, and Ali Aktan Askin.

Sleepingfish 8

Moshfegh, Ottessa

Williams, Diane

Cooper, Dennis

Gray, Amelia

Lim, Eugene

Schütt, Christine

Ohle, David

Lutz, Garielle

DeForest, Anna

Literary

30 Under 30 is an anthology of thirty top young writers publishing fiction today. Editors Blake Butler and Lily Hoang have compiled a collection of thirty stories from these thirty writers—all creating work on the more innovative side of things; a great opportunity for a reader to dip into their various styles and see which authors to look for more from.
Includes work from authors such as Shane Jones (Light Boxes), Matt Bell (How They Were Found), Joshua Cohen (Witz), and Kathleen Rooney (Live Nude Girl) and twenty-six others breaking ground, many publishing with smaller publishers.

30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers

Hoang, Lily

Starcherone Books

"If there's a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn't."—Dennis Cooper
"Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel."—Ben Marcus
I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did or didn't? Could this paper touch your face? I've spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I've read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues thin and white and speckled.
I don't want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.
Someday I plan to die.
Books that reappear when you destroy them, lampshades made of skin, people named with numbers and who can't recall each other, a Universal Ceiling constructed by an otherwise faceless authority, a stairwell stuffed with birds: the terrain and populace of Sky Saw is packed with stroboscopic memory mirage. In dynamic sentences and image, Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.
Blake Butler is the author of Ever, Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He is the editor of the literary blog HTMLGIANT.

Sky Saw

Tyrant Books

In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coa...

Scorch Atlas: A Belated Primer (Large Print 16pt)

ReadHowYouWant

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Butler, Blake. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Butler, Blake