“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
“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 is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence.”
—Gary Lutz
PRAISE FOR NOTHING
“The klieg-light intensity of Butler’s writing intimates that there is something fundamentally terrifying about what each of us does every single night, which is to pitch our minds and bodies into oblivion.”
—Time
“The primary effect of sentences like these is a powerful immersion. Reading them, we are running “Blake Butler” as a kind of executable software program in the hardware of our heads.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Think David Lynch. In the waking dreamscape where Butler’s thoughts spin out of control, he could be De Quincy’s opium-eater wandering through a Dali painting by way of a poem by Antonin Artaud.”
—Atlanta Journal & Constitution
“…a disorienting, fractal-edged portal into [Butler’s] increasingly elastic perception of consciousness, space-time, and metabolism.”
—The Onion A/V Club
“There are some cues from the sprawling internal monologues of Nicholson Baker and the genre-defying non-fiction of William T. Vollmann in this expansive exploration of sleeplessness, but Butler is a writer unto himself. Simply put, you haven’t ever read a book like Nothing before. It’ll keep you up at night”
—Creative Loafing Atlanta
“Lyrical…A weird, waking-dream of a memoir superbly illustrating the relentless inner spin of the insomniac.”
—Kirkus
PRAISE FOR THERE IS NO YEAR
“[There Is No Year] is a thing of such strange beauty that digging for answers of your own will yield the rewards that only well-made art can provide.”
—New York Times Book Review
“There is no novel like Blake Butler’s There Is No Year. . . . Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.”
—Denver Post
“Calling Blake Butler’s There Is No Year a novel is akin to calling René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images a pipe; both works subtly expand the framework of their respective disciplines by challenging an audience that has solidified its expectations after centuries of familiarity and repetition.”
—Time Out New York
“Dystopian and sinister.”
—Nylon
“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.”
—Publishers Weekly
“A smoke signal on the horizon of the American literary landscape. . . . [As] if Gertrude Stein wrote the script for a Kenneth Anger film set inside of a Norman Rockwell painting to be produced for YouTube with a John Cage soundtrack. . . . [Butler’s prose offers] ecstatic pleasures. . . . it bursts and cracks with inventions and constructions.”
—Creative Loafing
“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
SKY SAW
Tyrant Books
676A 9th Ave. #153
New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 2012 Blake Butler
All rights reserved
ISBN 13: 978-0-9885183-1-5
Cover and book design by Adam Robinson
Cover illustration by Truett Dietz
This is a work of fiction and all the characters, organizations, and events within it are from the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SKY SAW
BLK BTLR
Tyrant Books
New York City 2012
For GianCarlo
Content
I will pray
I will pray
I will go down low
And I will pray to you
Down as low as I can go
I will go there
And I will pray to you
– Michael Gira, “Sex, God, Sex”
Now
White cone descended in sound blister
There were the people having skin removed: to make the hood over our last evening
Cone, White cone, colored destroyed, slipped between the wall air and the bodice of the sacrificial mothers making money from the rummage of their wombs, unto the cone
Our homes turned on their sides, the sound of the descent fixed with the ripping split the image of our vision into ten and ten again, we watched the fluelight strobe from softer planets in the vision of the fly, our begging formed a prayer
