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FRIDAY TYRANT - THE BLAKE BUTLER BOOK-READING MARATHON

Told you guys

once

. All of this could have been easily avoided if you'd just listened to me, but now he's coming to collect. Coming like some weird mangy messiah from the South, returned years too late when all is past repair, flipping tables in an empty Bob Evan's that was at one time a temple. Blake Butler's new book

There Is No Year

will be released this spring by HarperPerennial and as a huge cocktease they have planned a reading of the book

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IN ITS ENTIRETY

, stretched over four nights, with a bunch of different people doing different sections. Butler will read as well, but it'd be a whole lot cooler if he just came to town to listen to his book read aloud to him by others and nodded occasionally while paring his nails, then went home after he was done fingering your girlfriend at the bar and grabbing a bagel (shit, just realized the latter could have been used as a euphemism for the former). Seriously, though. I'm excited for this. Every once in awhile something good happens to books. A larger publisher's editors set their balls up on the chopping block in order to push some real talent instead of keeping their backs against the wall and their heads turned as it all goes zipping by in the world of indie presses. I applaud them. It's hard to turn people onto different shit. But Butler's not just different. He goes so far out there that he winds up even deeper back inside of where he began; centered, deeper, and stuck in you. And there is no undoing of it. Some writers take the familiar and make it unfamiliar. Butler does that too, except he does the exact opposite of that. If people really wanted things to actually change, then this is the book that would be on Fried Okra's Book Scrub. You either write a book and title it

Freedom

, or you write a book that is truly free and then title it whatever the fuck you want. Butler titled his

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There is No Year

. Here is the flyer for the marathon reading next week. Come (to) one, come (to) all. Below the flyer are two excerpts from the novel, so you know what you're getting yourself into.

-- 13 DREAM DREAM SEQUENCE That night the father slept through thirteen dreams. In the first dream he was a priest. In a second dream he was in Judas Priest. In a third dream he betrayed himself. In a fourth dream he ate so much spaghetti he exploded. In a fifth dream he was a beach towel in an unlit closet. In a sixth dream he was a woman who came to the closet and threw up all the spaghetti into the beach towel. In a seventh dream he was all the beaches and all the sand. In an eighth dream he had a cubicle beneath a certain beach where gorgeous women came and forced him to have sex. In a ninth dream he got folded in a remaindered library book and sold on eBay to a woman who binge-ate twice a week. In a tenth dream the father became a series of explosions in a video game his son was playing. In an eleventh dream the father felt very tired, though in this world tired meant obese, though obese meant made of light. In a twelfth dream the father was asleep and could not be woke no matter how long they screamed or what weapons used. In a thirteenth dream the father woke and found himself above himself and inside his mouth he saw himself and inside that self's mouth he saw himself and inside that self's mouth he saw a window, and through the window the father saw another window, and through the window the father saw mountains, fountains, fortunes, beaches, gazebos, grease, disease, and the father found that he was laughing and the father crawled inside himself and turned around. -- DAYS The massive vehicle slid along the street until it stopped in the new rut around the house. Something had sawed into the yard's perimeter, made a little ditch that ran with sludge and seemed to sink into itself. The vehicle's soundless transmission warped several birds out of the sky, raining the birds onto the windshield, the carcasses of which were then sucked into a suction and used to fuel the vehicle. The back window of the vehicle folded down and out of it pushed the father. The father rolled down along the back hood and off the bumper into the street. He bruised his elbows on the pavement, bleeding clear. He stood up shaking and watched the long white vehicle drive off. The vehicle bruised the ground. The father was naked except for a metal bulb around his head. Two tiny slits allowed him to see out. There were not slits for ears or nose or mouth. The father had gained weight. The men had fed the father through long weird tubes and turkey basters. He did not know how long he'd been gone. There were no official charges. He'd been fully reprimanded. He'd been made to solve crossword puzzles in a small translucent box at the bottom of a public swimming pool, through which in his mind he could see the chubby men and women in their slick suits holding their children while they peed. He could see all the stuff the people's bodies flushed into the water, which came and stuck to the perimeter of the father's box. The crossword puzzles were designed to trigger complicated extrasensory properties. The father filled in 49 ACROSS with the word

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LASAGNA

and could taste it in his mouth. That was the good part. The father had had to fill in many other less delightful wordssuch as

LESION

, such as

NEED

, such assuch assuch as . . . Many other things, like all things, the father could not remember. He could not remember losing skin. He could not remember the skull-sized beams of other light they'd shined into his forehead and in the ruts behind his knees,

resetting the deletion, blank of blank on blank

. All the footlong pins they'd used, and the sledgehammer, and the prism and the dice. Days extracted in blood pictures. Doorbells. Birthdays. His new name(s). He could not remember anything about the other house, the box. The father could not remember, in any form, the sonthe grain of skin or glint of eye the child had in those first hours, as if having been rubbed with steel wool in the womb; the thin months thereafter in which he could still hold the child in a warm silence against his father chest, pleasant, grinning, before the son had learned to scream; the smell ejected from the holes that kicked out his baby teeth, like wire and old cheese

this smell had soon become so general it disappeared

. He could not remember the way for months at first as the child had begun speaking he'd called the father by his full name, first, middle, and last; how some days, all days, the son walked backward, even his first steps, before the steps the father and the mother would witness as his "first,"

the father had not known this ever anyway, at all

; or the letter the child had written to the father their fifth Christmas to say how much he loved the father, the letters out of order and poorly drawn, and the picture of the family there without faces, except the blackened O hole of the son's mouth at the exact center of his head, scribbled to rip. He did not remember the son's want and wishing, his decorations, their hours before the house while suns would rise, buses arriving to take the son off to some far location, the father on the lawn then waiting for his return in a light; evenings, hours, suppers, cushions, floors; invented games, the blanket mazes, puzzles. How the son could hide for hours in the house and not be found. The father no longer, in his body, held to an inch of this. He could not, in any alley of his remaining brain there, of what the men had left, recall a single thing about the child that stuck inside him but as bumping, but as tremor, itch or slur. The exit colors beating underneath his forehead, the window of his lungs.