Nothing - by Blake Butler (Paperback)

About the Book

If there s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn t. Dennis CooperFrom Blake Butler, one of the most challenging young writers of our time and the acclaimed author of the novel There Is No Year, comes a thrillingly wide-ranging and provocative book about insomnia from its role in history, art, and science through its unexpected consequences on Butler s personal imagination, creative process, and perspective on reality. Fans of David Foster Wallace, David Shields, and Dennis Cooper will be captivated by Blake Butler s darkly evocative prose and his daring exploration of the challenges of consciousness. "

Book Synopsis

"If there's a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn't." --Dennis Cooper

From Blake Butler, one of the most challenging young writers of our time and the acclaimed author of the novel There Is No Year, comes a thrillingly wide-ranging and provocative book about insomnia--from its role in history, art, and science through its unexpected consequences on Butler's personal imagination, creative process, and perspective on reality. Fans of David Foster Wallace, David Shields, and Dennis Cooper will be captivated by Blake Butler's darkly evocative prose and his daring exploration of the challenges of consciousness.

From the Back Cover

One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.

Invoking scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gilles Deleuze, John Cage, Anton LaVey, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Eno, and Stephen King, Butler traces the tension between sleeping and conscious life. And he reaches deep into his own experience--from disturbing waking dreams, to his father's struggles with dementia, to his own epic 129-hour bout of insomnia--to reveal the effect of sleeplessness on his imaginative landscape.

The result is an exhilarating exploration of dream and awareness, desperation and relief, consciousness and conscience--a fascinating maze-map of the borders between sleep and the waking world by one of today's most talked-about writers.

Review Quotes

"These stories, these stories: these sharp shards small and large . . . envelop you fully though they themselves remain fragmented, broken. Heart-stabbing stories and gut-wrenching stories, and therein lies surprise. Because for all of the apocalyptic dystopia imagery, grotesque and grand on its own, these are at their core stories about families, and stories about women: about beloved mothers and sisters, estranged wives and lost, lonely hurt little girls." - Ani Smith, Other Magazine

"If the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring." - Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"A grungier House of Leaves. . . . A deceptively brief read. . proves ever disquieting." - Review of Contemporary Literature

"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

"Lyrical...A weird, waking-dream of a memoir superbly illustrating the relentless inner spin of the insomniac." - Kirkus Reviews

"[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." - Flavorpill

"All words normally used to craft literary reviews fail. This is an entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader. The novel is like a 4G version of fiction . . . There are also all the elements of a traditional book, with fully developed characters, mystery, and movement that readers enjoy--and an evocative narrative voice sustained for 400 pages. Butler takes these ingredients and renders them into a dreamlike whorl, a highly stylized read that serves quite well as 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." - The Atlantan

"Butler excels at forcing the familiar through the a sieve of strange until it is stripped clean of its everyday banality, until it is once again made so fresh you can smell the decay it contains, until you can taste the despair that threatens to destroy not just his characters but also the dangerous worlds they inhabit." - Matt Bell, Dzanc Books

"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." - Time Out New York

"Like the best sur-reality, Butler's alien world is made from the building blocks of everyday life. . . . His novels and stories are linguistically twisted dispatches from a half-house, half-body in which the author himself seems to be imprisoned. While he struggles to escape into the outside world, he remains obsessed with what's at the end of the next abysmal hallway." - The Believer