There Is No Year: A Novel

"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." —FlavorpillWith 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.”

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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

The mother, the father, and the son move into a new house, and the strange occurrences begin. First, they must remove a copy family�identical to the father, the mother, and the son in every way save for their moldy teeth�from the house. Then they begin exploring the house�s many rooms�including one full of human hair. They gorge themselves on an impossibly large meal, and the mother finds a strange egg that causes all manner of bizarre things to occur, depending on where she touches it. Written in short, vignettelike chapters, this novel is intensely surreal and abstract. At times grotesque, at times sexual, always pushing the bounds of plot, form, narrative, and reality, the novel presents a demanding yet unique read. While the general state of anomie presented leaves the reader always guessing at the meaning of any given scene, the overall effect creates an interesting and convoluted tale of a family in distress. --Julie Hunt

New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

“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.”

Time Out New York

“A wild, poetic work.”

Nylon Magazine

“Dystopian and sinister. . . . In There Is No Year, Butler subverts our understanding of family relations, rendering domestic tragedy as both familiar and strange.”

Tucker Shaw, Denver Post

“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.”

Time Out Chicago

“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.”

Gina Angelotti, Metro

“[An] innovative masterpiece…a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.”

Publishers Weekly

“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.”

Library Journal

“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.”

Candra Kolodziej, The Stranger

“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.”

Dennis Cooper

“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.”

Ben Marcus

“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.”

The Atlantan

“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.”

Globe and Mail (Toronto)

“If the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

From the Back Cover

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.

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