A family moves into a new house, and strange things begin happening. They find an identical family living there. The furniture moves on its own. The father discovers a room filled with hair, and later, a passageway that leads to another, nearly identical house.
In Blake Butler’s new novel, There Is No Year, these scenes are told with such matter-of-factness and deadpan humor, it feels more like a David Lynch film than a horror story. The unanswered questions are part of its perverse fun. Or as Ben Marcus says, “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.”
There Is No Year doesn’t go on sale until April 5, but intrepid readers can hear Butler and fellow literati read the book over the course of four nights in New York. The friends accompanying him on this marathon reading—which begins at Franklin Park tomorrow, March 8, and continues at Word March 9, The Center for Fiction March 10, and powerHouse Arena on Friday, March 11—are esteemed authors, editors and lit bloggers. (Butler is an indie publisher himself—he edits HTMLGIANT.)
Among the special guests: Justin Taylor (The Gospel of Anarchy), Ben Greenman (What He’s Poised to Do), Giancarlo DiTrapano (Editor of New York Tyrant and Tyrant Books), Jonny Diamond (Editor of The L Magazine), James Yeh (co-editor of Gigantic Mag), Rachel Shukert (Everything is Going to Be Great), Emma Straub (Other People We Married) and Jo Weldon (The Burlesque Handbook). Come to all four events or even one, and your fandom will be rewarded with tokens of appreciation from HarperPerennial.
Details of the four-night reading of There Is No Year:
Tuesday 3/8, Franklin Park, 618 St. John’s Place, Crown Heights, 7pm
Readers:
Cal Morgan
Giancarlo DiTrapano
John Dermot Woods
Brittany Hamblin
Kendra Malone
Justin Taylor
Jon Cotner
Jo Weldon
Rachel Shukert
Blake Butler
Wednesday 3/9, WORD, 79 Franklin St., Greenpoint, 7:30 pm
Readers:
Cal Morgan
Giancarlo DiTrapano
John Dermot Woods
Erica Barmash
Kendra Malone
Sasha Fletcher
Mark Doten
Claire Donato
Jeff Johnson
Melissa Broder
Jonny Diamond
Emma Straub
Blake Butler
Thursday, 3/10, The Center for Fiction, 17 East 47th Street, Manhattan, 7pm
Readers:
Cal Morgan
Giancarlo DiTrapano
Michael Signorelli
Andrew Zornoza
Adam Robinson
James Yeh
Dorothea Lasky
Shya Scanlon
Catherine Lacey
Andrew James Weatherhead
Blake Butler
Friday 3/11, powerHouse Arena, 37 Main St., Dumbo, 6:30 pm
Readers:
Cal Morgan
Tyler Flynn Dorholt
Andrew James Weatherhead
Lincoln Michel
Melissa Broder
Kendra Malone
Catherine Lacey
Jonny Diamond
Adam Wilson
Ben Greenman
Blake Butler
“This kid can write. . . . Try Blake on. Lace him up. Wear him around your neck in wreaths.” —Vice