Blake Butler

Incorporating hundreds of characters and cultural entities, spanning innumerable locations and billions of years, Aannex is a future-hacker's maze-map meant to have already been mass-burned; a fakebook full of retroneuroviruses disguised as ecstasy for the condemned; a post-Joycean neo-slipstream sci-fi cult dream encyclopedia composed as algorithmic code compiled in-soul. Designed in a far future where the twin grandsons of Satan-Danad and Nadan-have retroactively rewritten the Holy Bible and therefore the course of human history in its wake, the precarious distinction between mass entertainment and mind control has gone so wonky even the zits who think they run the show can't trace what's what. Laced in the code: a bio-hybrid ex-contract killer travels through space-time seeking immortal vengeance on her autocratic overseers for their crimes...a claims specialist for Garko*Farx, the last remaining megacorporation, unpacks the kickback of finally investigating her bureaucratic complicity in the psycho-spiritual dissolution of all mankind...a former Top 40 producer turned warmonger laments the transmutation of his once aesthetic aspirations into the most formidable fascistic global death-dream ever conceived...all while the fundamental meta-rigging of a divine imagination reels for reformat against the collapsing cavity of narrative events, obfuscating fact and memory in the same process it might have used to set us free. Pressed to the virtual edges of an existence itself already pressed far beyond the revelation that nothing truly can be known, what else exists beyond the bleeding-rainbow-daze of logic's hope? How might we aspire from beyond our future meaning's mythic limits, or is it already too late?

From the ingenious mind of a language a wildly inventive novel about art, surveillance, our age of viral violence—and one woman's psychic survival A troubled, reclusive heiress, Alice Knott lives alone, haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious, near-identical brother. Much of her 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 several of her most prized artworks destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow, and an astonishing legacy of international art hangs in the balance, 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. Hallucinatory, unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a mind-bending rabbit hole of a a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art, the corporatization of culture, and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose struggles feel both fantastically apocalyptic and dangerously, universally real.

Il mondo è stato colpito da una serie di piaghe e ora le case sono sommerse nel fango, dal cielo piovono vetro e inchiostro, le persone scompaiono nel nulla e le città si sono ridotte a reperti urbani di una società che non esiste più. Alcuni superstiti calcano ancora le strade rovinate, ripercorrendo all'indietro i passi della loro vita passata, accarezzando le fotografie di coloro che hanno perduto e cercando un barlume di luce e una promessa di futuro nella nebbia di un oscuro presente. Questo romanzo a racconti, attraverso uno stile di scrittura che mescola un linguaggio poetico ed evocativo con stili narrativi differenti, racconta il sentimento della perdita, la voglia di evadere e la disperata necessità di speranza e fertilità in un mondo arido e tetro in cui è rimasto poco a cui aggrapparsi.

El atlas de ceniza es el segundo libro publicado del joven narrador norteamericano Blake Butler y se ha descrito como una «novela en historias». Este oscuro y misterioso libro está formado por un puñado de relatos breves, una serie de delicadas pinceladas del Apocalipsis que, hilvanadas, nos hacen viajar a un paraje desolador donde madres, padres, niños y toda suerte de deformaciones físicas y fenómenos meteorológicos imposibles conviven bajo un cielo sucio y oscuro que augura, sin estrépito y blandamente, el fin del mundo. Para los amantes de la ficción apocalíptica, de las historias bizarras contadas en voz baja a la lumbre de una de las últimas hogueras encendidas del vecindario, llega este atlas quemado y tiznado de hollín. Una postal desde un futuro imaginario que nadie querría llegar a conocer jamás.

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.

A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century. Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was. A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love. Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.

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.

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.

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.

Following up the 2023 publication of Blake Butler's smash hit memoir Molly, Archway Editions is proud to bring you Void Corporation, the revised and definitive paperback of his masterful 2020 novel Alice Knott, now with a new foreword from the author. The perfect introduction to Butler's hypnotic and wildly inventive fictional world for his many new fans.