Articles by Blake Butler
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What Are These Freaks Reading?
When summertime rolls around, all I want to do is stay inside and try not to sweat. I guess that’s why summer reading lists are a thing. In celebration of the year's most hellish season, I asked some writers I admire what books they’ve got piled up and waiting and where those books came from. Full story
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The Miami Heat Reader
Chris Bosh is considerate and thoughtful, interested in discussing the physics of a sentence, the use of dreams in creating plot, and irregular meter. For several years he kept a reading diary on LiveJournal under the username BigUpsBoshMane, which he later deleted, finding as he… Full story
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'Fence' Has Been Reconfiguring the Literary Landscape for 15 Years
Since 1998, 'Fence' magazine has been independently publishing a biannual journal of prose, poetry, art, and criticism; in 2001, they bagan publishing several lines of innovative, ambitious books. While most magazines (this one excluded, of course) and literary journals can be dr… Full story
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Please Start Banning Books Again
I kind of miss the idea of cultural lines that one can’t step over. One of my most memorable high school experiences was getting a permission slip signed by my parents so I could listen to an audiotape of Allen Ginsberg reading “America.” Full story
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Suck on the Monolith
Ken Baumann is best known for his role as Ben on ABC Family’s teen drama show, 'The Secret Life of the American Teenager,' but offscreen he’s of a wholly other mode. Besides spending his TV dollars as publisher of Sator Press, an independent publishing house that traffics in ambi… Full story
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Anton Chekhov Versus Jeffrey Dahmer
For some reason I think about the cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer every time someone mentions Anton Chekhov, a forefather of the contemporary short story. I can’t help but want to draw them out, to put them together in a cage and watch their brains bump. And so the oth… Full story
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Sarcophagi of Prisoners Covered in Cocaine
Johannes Göransson new book, 'Haute Surveillance,' is kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, but with way more starlets and cocaine and semen. Full story
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Tupac, Neck Braces, and Suicide: An Interview with Harmony Korine
In 1998, after his feature-length directorial debut, 'Gummo,' Harmony Korine published a novel called 'A Crackup at the Race Riots.' For years the book has been out of print, fetching prices upward of $300 online—until recently, when it was repackaged. Harmony was kind enough to… Full story
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The Unrelenting Novels of Thomas Bernhard
Often characterized by a seething loathing of social decor, patriotism, and ego, and fed by years spent suffering from tuberculosis and a gathering madness that would eventually force him to spend two years in a sanatorium, Bernhard's work is some of the blackest, most bare-teeth… Full story
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Shapes That Make You Dizzy
Coconut Books is the print arm of the longest-running online poetry publisher I can think of. In the past several months they’ve released a slew of wicked new books. Here are my thoughts on three of them, along with an excerpt from each. Full story
The Mare
A New Story by Mary Gaitskill 
Toppling a Delicate World
Being Gay and South Asian In America 
There's No Sex in Prison Showers
We Usually Wore Our Underwear 
Try Not to Destroy Your Life
The First Time I Took Molly 
A Teacher and Her Student
Marilynne Robinson on Staying Out of Trouble 
"Whitey" Isn't Very Popular in Boston
Interviews with Some of His Old Friends 
