Blake Butler

http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
http://www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com/
Blake Butler lives in Atlanta. His third book, There Is No Year, is forthcoming April 2011 from Harper Perennial.
Word is there are already only about 100 copies of this new magic object left available for sale, so you might wanna do a snatch it, New York Tyrant 7, featuring fiction by: Alex Balk, Blake Butler, Erich Hintze, Danni Iosello, Brian Kubarycz, Christopher Kennedy, Joseph Cardinale, Jason Schwartz, Greg Mulcahy, Luca Dipierro, Rachel B. Glaser, Atticus Lish, Ken Baumann, G. David Schwartz, Peter Gajdics, Peter Markus, Shane Jones, Conor Madigan, Scott Indrisek, Harry Cheadle, Joshua Furst, Michael Kimball, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.
Also, for those in NY: Issue Project Room event: 12/11 @ 8:00pm – Littoral Series: New York Tyrant with Phillip Stearns, readings by Eric Hintze and Eugene Marten.
Wow: “Eclipse is a free on-line archive focusing on digital facsimiles of the most radical small-press writing from the last quarter century. Eclipse also publishes carefully selected new works of book-length conceptual unity.” They have books by Rae Armantrout, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Aram Saroyan, and countless others, all archived on their site for free download and perusal.
Having heard Justin read a few of the stories from here, and having read others in New York Tyrant, Canteen, and elsewhere, I can say that even if I weren’t friends with Justin, and a labelmate, I’d be pretty fucking excited about his forthcoming book, Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever. You don’t have to listen to me though, here’s Padgett Powell: “Mr. Taylor has perfect touch, to frightening effect, does not presume, has power, and promises us new things. There is a debt paid to Donald Barthelme… and a strange undertow of Philip Roth, which makes for a new literary beast.”
You can preorder it now. It’s under $10 on Amazon. Or you can go direct to the publisher. Yes. Excited.
There is no reason to see the film version of The Road. Sure, it looks OK, and the acting is OK, but if you’ve read it, it’s a word for word thing mostly, and takes away from the imagination. It actually kind of made me despise the book, which had managed to make it past even Oprah. Corn.
Mark Baumer, of Everyday Yeah and the Brown MFA blog, writes in with some tips on writing gleaned from what last week or the week before was the #1 movie in America…
John Cusack or Jackson Curtis wrote a book called Farewell Atlantis. In the year 2012, according to the movie 2012, it will become the most famous book in the world. Everything I’ve read about Jackson Curtis leads me to believe he was very forward thinking. It was obvious from watching the movie that he had planned his rise in the publishing game long before the world came to an end and flooded and repositioned itself despite an original print run of less than 500 copies.
Here is a list of everything Jackson Curtis did to become the world’s most famous author. I’d like to point out that this list doubles as a nice how-to guide for becoming the most famous living author after the world has killed itself.
1. A few days before the end of the world wake up late and make excuses about the traffic when your ex-wife calls and asks why you having picked up the kids yet.
2. Take the limo when your Jeep doesn’t start.
3. Wave to the plastic surgeon dude who is boning your ex-wife only because his skills are important later in the movie.
4. Drive limo to Yellowstone National Park while singing songs with daughter in the front seat. Ignore your son in the backseat. He is being a little douche bag. Let him listen to the music. Don’t worry, he won’t be completely useless his whole life.
5. At Yellowstone, climb over fences marked with trespassing signs. Ignore the dead elks roasting on the former lake where you and your wife used to have sex.
6. Make friends with the head scientist for the United States who is leading up the investigation on the end of the world. This will only be possible if the head scientist’s father has already read your book and has given it to his son. Make sure the father of the head scientist investigating the end of the world has read your book before you trespass at Yellowstone.
7. Ask your daughter if she still wets the bed.
8. Hang out in Woody Harrelson’s camper. Take his last beer.
9. Bring kids home early when ex-wife freaks out over an earthquake at the supermarket.
10. Don’t believe the government when they say, “The worst is over.”
Amelia Gray makes sense out of the Publishers Weekly and WILLA kerfuffle at the Huffington Post: “To vastly extrapolate, assuming that the number of top-quality male and female writers is equally distributed, most journals would publish more men than women, without even considering bias.”
As well, a couple book-related holiday sales ending today: Powell’s offers free shipping (their used stacks in particular are worth exploring, plus nice discount on NYRB classics) & Keyhole‘s discounts on all of their titles & (beyond today, but still) Dzanc offering up to 50% on all of their backlist. Foom.
Hope everybody is fatter now. Crawling back into the void this week, last night rewatched most of Orson Welles’s last completed feature film, F for Fake, a documentary about fakes and fakers, which in itself does a little trickery and deceit, making a nice little cakebox of weird. Criterion put it out a couple years ago, but it’s also now on YouTube in a few pieces. Here’s part one, then follow the links…
There are a handful of presses it would be nice to own every single title they’ve ever released. Exact Change easily makes that list. Xmas party.