•Blake Butler was recently named one of Dzanc Books’ 20 Writers to Watch (an alternative-lit answer to The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40 list).

•Butler’s previous book, the story collection Scorch Atlas, was one of five finalists for this year’s Believer Book of the Year award.

“Blake Butler is the rare young writer who consistently and effectively challenges his readers.” —Largehearted Boy

“This kid can write. . . . Try Blake on. Lace him up. Wear him around your neck in wreaths.” —Vice

Butler’s new novel, There Is No Year, marks his debut publication with a mainstream house, after two works from small presses that attracted major attention in this country and abroad—in venues from The Believer to Vice to London’s 3:AM Magazine, all of which praised Butler as one of the most original and inventive voices of his generation. And Atlanta’s Creative Loafing has already cited There Is No Year as one of their “most anticipated” works of the next twelve months.

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.