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." —Flavorpill

With 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.”

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.

“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

“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’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

“A grungier House of Leaves. . . . A deceptively brief read, Ever proves ever disquieting.” - Review of Contemporary Literature

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

“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.” - Publishers Weekly

“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.” - Candra Kolodziej, The Stranger

“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

“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.” - Tucker Shaw, Denver Post

“[An] innovative masterpiece…a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.” - Gina Angelotti, Metro

“A wild, poetic work.” - Time Out New York

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

“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

“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 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

“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.” - The Atlantan

“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.” - New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)

“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.” - Time Out Chicago