Forthcoming
UXA.GOV (novel) Nov 2024
Alice Knott (paperback) Nov 2024
Newly Released
Molly (Archway Editions, 2023)
“The most immediate feeling of life I’ve ever had reading a book—a life lived at the desk and out in the world, a life of openness and secrets. ‘Make art for me,’ Molly wrote to Blake. ‘I will read it all.’ I breathed along with every word.”
— Patricia Lockwood
“How to praise a book of such wounded beauty as Blake Butler’s phenomenal Molly? The same way one would a life lost early: with love and sincerity and anger and wonder and lithely elegant and observant insights that remind us and inspire us, as Butler precisely does, to live and to love ourselves.”
— John D’Agata
“Molly is a brilliant and brutal book. Blake Butler fearlessly takes on love and grief and the mysteries of this world and the next.”
— Emma Cline
“A dark miracle—actual evidence that what we can never know, what we could never imagine about the one we love, is what binds us to them, beyond death.”
— Michael W. Clune
“I was gripped from the start by this memoir’s urgent honesty. Blake Butler turned a story that was almost unspeakable into a narrative at once brutal and loving, broken and solid.”
— Catherine Lacey
- excerpt in Harper’s
- excerpt at The Paris Review
- excerpt in Forever
- review in LA Times
- review in The New Yorker
- review at Slate
- review in Telegraph
- review in Atlanta Journal & Constitution
- review at Hobart
- review in Bookforum
- review in New York Times
- review in The Times (UK)
- review in The New Statesman
- review in Cleveland Review of Books
- interview at The Spectator
- interview at Interview
- opinion at CNN
- reflection at London Review of Books
- profile in Vanity Fair
- podcast at Poetry Foundation
- podcast at LA Review of Books
- podcast at Post Era
- DC’s best of 2023
Fiction
Aannex (Apocalypse Party, 2022)
- conversation at Bomb
- DC’s best of 2022
- podcast at Wake Island
- podcast at Beyond the Zero
Alice Knott (Riverhead, 2020)
“A bold and innovative existential mystery that moves us not towards resolution but deeper into the powerfully strange oceans of fractured memories, damaged love, and lost histories. This book is a thrill, a terror, a heartbreak.”
— Laura van den Berg
“A strange and beguiling masterpiece, an immersive experience of psychic disorder that becomes ever more profound as you read on.”
— Alexandra Kleeman
“Devastatingly beautiful . . . . Alice Knott challenges us to remember how we might yet devote ourselves to life—and each other—differently.”
— Lidia Yuknavitch
“Alice Knott is a thrilling, subversive novel, part fever dream, part high-culture acid trip, part dystopian masterpiece. A dazzling, dangerous book.”
— Christopher Bollen
“Blake Butler is one of our most fearless insurgents against the numbing flow of contemporary life. With Alice Knott he’s created a Lynchian fever dream about the voracious march of capitalism and the vulnerable place of art in our society, with vividly crisp sentences and syntax that could cut diamonds.”
— Catherine Lacey
“This book is an incantation—to read it is to be put under its spell. Alice Knott is ferocious, masterful, and truly unforgettable.”
— Chelsea Hodson
- review at New York Times
- review at The Nation
- review at The Observer
- review at Atlanta Journal-Constitution
- review at LA Review of Books
- review at zyzzyva
- review at Dead End Follies
- review at World Literature Today
- interview at Creative Independent
- 60 authors read from AK at Lithub (video)
- interview at The Believer
- excerpt at Guernica
- excerpt at NY Tyrant
300,000,000 (Harper Perennial, 2014)
“This book is the poetry of insanity. Hugely beautiful and monstrously disturbed. I love it, and Blake Butler’s mad criminal mind.”
— Warren Ellis
“This book is like a Rorschach blot made of blood. All my darkest visions appeared there. Blake Butler’s work is not for the faint of heart. And I mean that as a high compliment.”
— Jenny Offill
“300,000,000 establishes Blake Butler as our premier literary shaman. . . . [It] draws us into the darkest circles of human motivation. You’ll think about it daily and return to it compulsively; it will leave you with fever dreams of the highest possible resolution.”
— Alissa Nutting
- review at NPR
- review at LA Times
- review at Creative Loafing
- review at The Millions
- review at The Rumpus
- review at Electric Literature
- review at Full Stop
- review at Kirkus
- review at Cornell Sun
- profile/review at The Lifted Brow
- playlist at Dazed
- spotlight at DC’s
- ‘A Year in Reading - Dennis Cooper’ at the Millions
- interview at The Believer
- interview at Decoder
- review/interview at Dead End Follies
- interview at Berfrois
- interview at Time Out NY
- interview at VICE
There is No Year (Harper Perennial, 2011)
“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler, . . . well, there just isn’t.”
— Dennis Cooper
“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.”
— Ben Marcus
- review at New York Times
- review at Bookforum
- review at Publishers Weekly
- review at Kirkus
- profile at Observer
- profile at Creative Loafing
- ‘book notes’ at Largehearted Boy
- interview at Bookslut
- interview at Impose
- interview at The Rumpus
- interview at Willow Springs
Scorch Atlas (Featherproof, 2009)
Shortlisted for the Believer Book Award
“Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas is precisely that — a series of maps, or worlds, “tied... so tight they couldn’t crane their necks.” Everything is either destroyed, rotting or festering -- and not only the physical objects, but allegiances, hopes, covenants. Yet these worlds are not abstract exercises, he is speaking of life as it is, where there might be or may be, “glass over grave sites in display,” and where we will be forced to make or where we have “made facemasks out of old newspapers.” The sole glimmer of light comes in recollection, as in: “a bear the size of several men... There in the woods behind our house, when I was still a girl like you.””
—Jesse Ball
“Blake Butler engages in a struggle worth witnessing. Amid the loosely woven threads that constitute his story, shards of crystal poetry strand the reader in wonderment. There’s something so big about Blake’s writing. Big as men’s heads. Each inhale of Blake’s wheeze brings streamers of loose hair, the faces of lakes and oceans, whales washed up half-rotten. You can try putting on a facemask made out of old newspaper. You can breathe in smaller rhythms. But you won’t be able to keep this man out once you’ve opened his book. Open it!”
—Ken Sparling
“I am always looking for new writers like Blake Butler and rarely finding them, but Scorch Atlas is one of those truly original books that will make you remember where you were when you first read it. Scorch Atlas is relentless in its apocalyptic accumulation, the baroque language stunning in its brutality, and the result is a massive obliteration.”
—Michael Kimball
- review at Redivider
- review at Brooklyn Rail
- review at Tarpaulin Sky
- review at Pank
- review at Identity Theory
- excerpt at 52 Stories (originally appeared in Ninth Letter)
- 'book notes' at Largehearted Boy
- interview at 3AM
- interview at Thought Catalog
Ever (Calamari Press, 2009)
"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. Articulating viscera, ever inside, Butler's narrative dispatches are enclosed between parentheses like unfinished houses, the pages opening out occasionally into exquisitely burnished fields of imagery. Much in the way minerals are pushed up past the mantle by core collisions, EVER reads to me like new evidence, delicate gear that allows us to glimpse a place we've always lived but still don't know." — Miranda Mellis
Nonfiction
Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia (Harper Perennial, 2011)
- review at New York Times
- Editors' Choice at New York Times
- review at Time Magazine
- review at Paste
- review at Kirkus
- review at Onion AV Club
- review at Creative Loafing
- review at Dead End Follies
- excerpt at The Nervous Breakdown
- interview for KQED
- interview on KNPR
- interview at Interview Magazine
Collaborative Work
One (w/ Vanessa Place & Christopher Higgs) (Roof Books, 2012)
14 Dreams of Death (w/ Ken Baumann & M Kitchell) (Solar▲Luxuriance, 2012)
Anatomy Courses (w/ Sean Kilpatrick) (Lazy Fascist Press, 2012)
In Translation
300 Millions (Editions Inculte, 2019) trans. Charles Recoursé
Atlante Delle Ceneri (Pidgin Edizioni, 2018)
Nada (Alpha Decay, 2012)
El Atlas de Ceniza (Alpha Decay, 2013)
As Editor
30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction (w/ Lily Hoang) (Starcherone Books, 2001)
- review at Fiction Advocate
- review at Full Stop
- interview at Bomb
The One on Earth: Selected Works of Mark Baumer (Fence, 2021)