Blake Butler, Harper Perennial, $14.99 trade paper (368p) ISBN 978-0-06-199742-6
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...
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Blake Butler. Tyrant (Consortium, dist.), $15 trade paper (200p) ISBN 978-0-9850235-0-8
For the apocalyptically minded Butler, language isn’t employed simply to tell a story, but to register decay—and the prose of his latest novel is so meticulous, claustrophobic, and virtuosic that it’s almost painful to read. But it’s a pain that his
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Blake Butler. Harper, $16.99 trade paper (576p) ISBN 978-0-06-227185-3
Butler’s work ranges from hallucinatory nihilism (There Is No Year) to his polymathic memoir Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. In his most recent offering, the title and the five-part structure both recall and (feebly) parody Roberto Bolaño’s 2666....
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Blake Butler. Riverhead, $28 (320p) ISBN 978-0-525-53521-8
Butler (300,000,000) unwinds a vertiginous, deeply interior tale of art vandalism and a woman’s derangement. When a video showing the destruction of a Willem de Kooning painting goes viral, copycat crimes erupt across the world. The de Kooning,...
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Blake Butler. Archway, $16.99 trade paper (320p) ISBN 978-1-64823-037-0
This shattering memoir from novelist Blake (Alice Knott) recounts his relationship with poet and memoirist Molly Brodak, who died by suicide in 2020, when she was 39. Painting the couple’s courtship and marriage as both turbulent and tender, Butler...
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