About There Is No Year:

On its surface, There Is No Year is a novel about a simple family of three—father, mother, son—who have suffered through the son's mysterious, near-fatal illness. Yet in Butler's world, such stories are only the stimulus for a rich, near-blinding, hallucinatory wonder of a narrative, in which all three members of the family feel their way through vivid yet unknowable challenges: a "copy family" that appears in their house; a series of holes and "puckers" that appear in their walls; a parade of ants that infest their floors and hair; memories that deceive; and, figures that tempt and lure and withdraw. At length—as the son returns to school, where he is befriended by an oddly familiar "girl," and as his parents reckon with the mysterious texts they find swarming upon their walls—this apparently dystopian landscape begins to hint at something much fresher: a fable about survival and the fierce burden of art.

A Lynchian exploration of expression and meaning, There Is No Year offers keys and doors, yet never guarantees the former will open the latter. Teeming with unforgettable imagery and language, it is a work of poetic power and fierce impact that defies you to shake it from your mind.

About the author:

Blake Butler is the author of the novella Ever and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas, named Novel of the Year by 3:AM Magazine. He edits HTML Giant, "the internet literature magazine blog of the future," as well as two journals of innovative text, Lamination Colony and No Colony. His writing has appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009, and has been shortlisted in Best American Nonrequired Reading. He blogs at gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com and lives in Atlanta.