UPDATE! CONTEST! Find the three 80s indie/punk band album titles in his piece (one title contains the adjective rather than the noun in the two word title) and I will send you a bunch of books. I will be seriously impressed, too.

We all have a better half. My better half is actually a human being. He wrote his thoughts about Ever by Blake Butler.  Here they are:

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The narrative constraints of Ever – presumably a woman inside a room; that’s it – is a precarious way to write a novella. Without characters, plot arcs, locations, etc., language itself is summoned as a surrogate protagonist. The writer – thus reader – are both stripped of the typical arsenal of fiction; what is left is simply language’s ability to summon or evoke the most intrinsic visceral ‘truths’ of being alive, a collection of nerves funneled into a consciousness.

And that is, at heart, what Blake Butler’s Ever is about, a kind of timeless consciousness that is, remarkably and/or ironically, very relevant to a particular time: now – dispersed with cryptic evocations of some post-apocalyptic world, as in “[…] not that we knew the moon here anymore […]” Notice that Butler chooses the word ‘knew’ instead of the more likely ’saw’ or ‘had.’ This suggests either a cognizant or intuitive decision to focus more on perception than facts.

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Results of the Blake Butler “Ever” mean giveaway are in.  (Actually they have been in since Friday.   Apathy is a motherfucker.)
Blake picked Ryan Bradley.  It was a toss up between Barry and Darby for me.  Barry was slightly meaner.

Barry and Ryan email me your addresses.  I need to put the order in before I forget.

*No retards have been depicted in this post.

Blake Butler—our fearless leader here at htmlgiant—has a novella coming from the mighty Calamari Press. Go here to pre-order it.

That is all.