Friday, October 14, 2011

Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

My first book of nonfiction came out this week.



Review in Time

Review in New York Times (Editor's Choice)

Review in Creative Loafing

Review/interview at Fanzine

Review in Atlanta Journal & Constitution

Review at Onion A/V Club

Interview in Interview

Radio Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show (WNYC)

Podcast at Other People

* * *

You can get Nothing now at Amazon, SPD, stores, etc.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

i gave my dad some candy

MOM: What do you say when someone gives you something you want?
DAD: I want this.

Monday, October 3, 2011

30 Under 30


i have extra copies of this 30 Under 30 Anthology of younger innovative writers I edited with Lily Hoang, out a month or so ago. if you would like one, paypal $12 to blakebutler [at] gmail [dot] com (shipping included)


"30 Under 30 offers an impressive cross-section of innovative American fiction by young writers. If you're tired of the 'authorized version' and want a sense of where fiction is really going, what its future shapes and forms are likely to be, this is the place to start." - Brian Evenson, author of Fugue State and The Open Curtain.

"Cops in the clouds, a father and daughter’s mythic severing, fictions of spreadsheets, a story ending in future tense. For those young enough still to live in language, words are tangible as slivers, as hard candy in the mouth. These thirty assemble the outlandish, the ecstatic, the wild, and there’s a conviction they can just do this." - R. M. Berry, author of Frank and Dictionary of Modern Anguish

CONTRIBUTORS: Joanna Ruocco » Brian Oliu » Michael J. Lee » Angi Becker Stevens » Shane Jones » Devin Gribbons » Christina Kloess » James Yeh » William Seabrook » Danielle Adair » Megan Milks » Rachel Glaser » Michael Stewart » Sean Kilpatrick » Andrea Kneeland » Zach Dodson » Beth Couture » Mike Young » Kathleen Rooney & Elisa Gabbert » Joshua Cohen » Matt Bell » Adam Good » Andrew Farkas » Jaclyn Dwyer » Ryan Downey » Ryan Call » Kristina Born » Conor Madigan » Rebecca Jean Kraft » Evenlyn Hampton

Thursday, August 11, 2011

what would happen if a private source offered $5 million to 1st American who can convince someone in their family to commit suicide on film

Saturday, July 30, 2011

This story is called wrote a new story today

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Sunday, July 24, 2011

you can now get my book EVER in ebook form for $6 from Calamari Press

Monday, June 27, 2011

In the Heart of the Country by Coetzee is really fantastic

Friday, June 17, 2011

things are gpomg tp get worse arent they
sometimes
book
reviews
make
me
wonder
if
there
are
really
any
people

Sunday, June 12, 2011

"There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier. . . . Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.

"So we are built."

Sunday, April 10, 2011

There is No Year reading tour

Going out for a little stretch on the road to do reading junk from There is No Year; if you are nearby, would be rad to hang out!

Monday, April 11, 2011
POWELL'S BOOKSTORE
1005 West Burnside Portland, OR 97210
7:30

Tuesday, April 12, 2011
UNIVERSITY BOOKSTORE
4326 University Way Seattle, WA 98105
7:00

Thursday, April 14, 2011
CITY LIGHTS BOOKSTORE
261 Columbus AVE San Francisco, CA 94133-4586
7:00

Friday, April 15, 2011
SKYLIGHT BOOKS
1818 N. Vermont AVE Los Angeles, CA 90027
7:30

Sunday, April 17, 2011
Largehearted Lit series - at WORD
126 Franklin ST Brooklyn, NY 11222
7:30

Monday, April 18, 2011
MCNALLY JACKSON BOOKS
52 Prince ST New York, NY 10012
7:00

Wednesday, April 20, 2011
BROOKLINE BOOKSMITH
279 Harvard St Brookline, MA 02446
7:00

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

There is No Year drops today

Seems wild to already be at April 5 2011, but here we are.

There is No Year is available widely, including online at several places found here.

Amazon has it for like less than $9, and there are the brick stores that are alive.



An immense honor to have blurbs from two of my favorite writers of all time:

“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

"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. There is No Year is a merciless novel cleansed of joy, pumped full of fear and awe."
— Ben Marcus

Thanks again to all who've done so much for me and continue to do so much. I couldn't feel happier.

I hope you'll check out the book if you feel it.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

"In fantasies of romance it was she who fought and overcame thereon to rescue some object or figure that never in the reverie resolved or took to itself any shape or name."

Thursday, March 17, 2011

4 Recent Internet Shits of Me Running My Mouth Etc

Profile of myself & HTMLGiant & There is No Year at the NY Observer: concerning David Lynch, internet machines, ego blur, and getting shit done

Excerpt from There is No Year at the Collagist: three consecutive scenes from Part 2 of 4, re: the mother's relationship with a polymer egg and a lawnmower

Interview at Bomb re: 4-night marathon reading of There is No Year in NYC, the internet as place, metaphor as fartcity, etc.

q/a & new short text "Hexagon" @ The Center for Fiction's The Literarian: a recursive piece concerning fornication, hibernation, wanting, pig babies, ass ends of the universe(s), etc. (connected in some way to this other short piece published earlier this year at Guernica, "I do love god"

+ + +

Also to announce, my 4th book, a nonfiction work about sleep and insomnia, titled Nothing, is slated for release this November.

Friday, February 18, 2011

"Are you in there?" "In where." "In you." [shakes head no] "Where are you then?" "I don't know." "Where would you like to be?" "I don't give a shit." "What would make you happy?" "I don't know." [drinks V8]

Monday, January 31, 2011

There is No Year reviewed by PW, Kirkus, Library Journal

3 nice reviews from nice places seems nice




from Publishers Weekly:

Butler's inventive third book is dedicated "For no one" and begins with an eerie prologue about the saturation of the world with a damaging light. Suitably forewarned, the reader is introduced to an unexceptional no-name family. All should be idyllic in their newly purchased home, but they are shadowed by an unwelcome "copy family." In the face of the copy mother, the mother sees her heretofore unrealized deterioration. Things only get worse as the father forgets how to get home from work; the mother starts hiding in the closet, plagued by an omnipresent egg; while the son gets a female "special friend" and receives a mysterious package containing photos of dead celebrities. The territory of domestic disillusion and postmodern dystopia is familiar from other tales, but Butler's an endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer. This subversion extends to the book's design: very short titled chapters with an abundance of white space. Not so much a novel as a literary tapestry, the book's eight parts are separated by blank gray pages. To Butler (Scorch Atlas), everything in the world, even the physical world, is gray and ever-changing, and potentially menacing. (Apr.)


from Kirkus:

A family lives in a house in which strange things start to happen (or—it’s a new novel by Blake Butler).

Love him, hate him or feign indifference: There’s really no other way to react to the work of writer/postmodernist/multi-hyphenate Butler (Ever, 2009, etc). For those who like their prose fresh out of a cleaner and more traditional wellspring, Blake’s writing can prove tedious at best and arduous at worst. But for those who lean toward writing that is more visceral, taxing or outright demanding of the reader, this might be the right cup of tea—see Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), to which this novel owes some debt. The book concerns a family of doppelgängers so featureless that Butler doesn’t bother to give them names (or more accurately, likely purposefully washes them out to their elementary characteristics). So, the father, the mother and the son live in a house, just like the carbon copy father, mother and son had done before them. The father stares at a computer screen. The mother stares at her lined face in mirrors and thinks protective thoughts about her son, who suffers from a disease that nearly ended his life. The son goes to school, makes a friend and watches television with his family. It’s all presented in hushed, monochrome language that gives the whole enterprise a sense of menace from the beginning, even before Butler introduces the father’s paranoia that things in the house are changing without his knowledge. And then things do start changing.

A gruesome slice of familial oddity that demonstrates its author’s versatility.


from Library Journal:

Butler keeps the reader guessing in his latest novel. A family moves into a house where another family lives—a lifeless, unseeing copy of the family. The family goes through individual psychological and paranormal experiences that make one wonder about the origins of the family’s demise—Is it the son’s carefully mentioned past disease? Some metaphysical demon in the son’s subconscious? Or does the newly purchased house cloak discontented poltergeists? Whatever the cause, each family member endures a private psychological hell that is disturbing in its authenticity. ­VERDICT This artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature is recommended for contemporary literature fans looking for something out of the ordinary. Butler integrates unusual elements into his novel, such as interview-style monologs and in later chapters poetry-like stanzas. Also recommended for students of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as the distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis. [Eight-city tour.]—Jennifer Funk, Southwestern Illinois Coll. Lib., Belleville

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

"When the notes were all burned, all that writing, as Franz expressed himself, he, Wertheimer, called up Salzburg and ordered the piano and Franz distinctly recalled that during this telephone call his master kept insisting that they send a completely worthless, a horribly untuned grand piano to Traich. A completely worthless instrument, a horribly untuned instrument, Wertheimer is supposed to have repeated over and over on the phone, said Franz."

Monday, January 3, 2011

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