{"product_id":"there-is-no-year-a-novel-isbn-9780061997426","title":"There Is No Year: A Novel","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author.\" —\u003cem\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"[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.\" —\u003cem\u003eFlavorpill\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith 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 \u003cem\u003eHouse of Leaves \u003c\/em\u003eand the films of David Lynch, \u003cem\u003eThere Is No Year \u003c\/em\u003eoffers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto \u003cem\u003eGlobe and Mail \u003c\/em\u003esays, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.” \u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003eA family of three: father, mother, son. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA house that gives them shelter but shapes their nightmares.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAn illness that nearly arrested the past, and looms over the future.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA second family—a copy family. Mirror bodies.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEvents on the horizon: a hole, a box, a light, a girl. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHoles in houses. Holes in speaking. Holes in flesh.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMemories that deceive and figures that tempt and lure and withdraw.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThere Is No Year\u003c\/em\u003e is the astonishing new novel by Blake Butler. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is a world of scare, a portrait of return, a fable of survival and the fierce burden of art. \u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003e“Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Believer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMatt Bell, Dzanc Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eFlavorpill\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A grungier House of Leaves. . . . A deceptively brief read, Ever proves ever disquieting.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eReview of Contemporary Literature\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“If the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eGlobe and Mail (Toronto)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eCandra Kolodziej, The Stranger\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBen Marcus\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTucker Shaw, Denver Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[An] innovative masterpiece…a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eGina Angelotti, Metro\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A wild, poetic work.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTime Out New York\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Dystopian and sinister. . . .  In There Is No Year, Butler subverts our understanding of family relations, rendering domestic tragedy as both familiar and strange.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNylon Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAni Smith, Other Magazine\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDennis Cooper\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantan\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“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.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eTime Out Chicago\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper Perennial","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44889184108773,"sku":"NP9780061997426","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780061997426.jpg?v=1730230701","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/there-is-no-year-a-novel-isbn-9780061997426","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}