Blake Butler
The Face Everyone Dreams About
"This Man," as he is regularly referred to, first appeared in New York in 2006, when a psychiatrist sketched the face of a man who had begun showing up in her dreams repeatedly.
All the Books I Read in 2014
You might think literature is a dying art, but there are more books now than ever. This year the stacks on stacks piled up around me. Here's a list, in chronological order, of what I read.
We Live in Hiromi Itō’s Wasteland
Hiromi Itō's first book to be translated into English, Killing Kanoko, takes its title from a poem in which the author, having recently given birth to a daughter, imagines killing the child numerous times.
A Roller Coaster Designed to Kill People
Artist Julijonas Urbonas designed something called the Euthanasia Coaster—a roller coaster that would hypothetically go so fast that the rider would die. I got in touch with him to learn more about the ride and see if he's afraid of death.
A Written Museum of Murder, Suicide, and Revelation in Baltimore
John Dermot Woods's new book, The Baltimore Atrocities, sculpts hundreds of sad, haunting miniature stories into a sort of Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not museum of horrors.
The Top Ten Worst Beatles Songs
For a complete list of the worst Beatles songs, gather their discography in one long queue and press play.
Six Uniquely Terrifying Books for Halloween
It’s the time of year when everybody is celebrating autumn by carving faces into various squash plants and thinking about weird monsters. That sounds cool, but I’m also into more complex forms of horror. If you are too, here's a list of books that...
Talking Video Games and Ghosts with John Darnielle
I recently emailed with Mountain Goats mastermind and Wolf In White Van author John Darnielle about his new book, his history with gaming, haunted feelings, and much more.
Yannick Murphy Puts You in the Mind of a Serial Killer
Yannick Murphy's new novel, This Is the Water, begins with a True Detective-esque set up, but the power of the book comes less from the murder mystery than from the way she places us in the minds of her characters. I reached out to the...
Grandiose Predictions for the 2014 NFL Season
The first week of the 2014 NFL season is in the books and already things are looking rather insane. With just this tip of the iceberg in mind, here are some predictions I’ve brought back from the astral realm for football fans this fall.
Geographic North Redefines Space
As someone who has trouble finding new music that doesn’t make me want to burn my stereo, I have been consistently impressed by the releases from Atlanta's Geographic North records.
Love in the Time of Xanax and Nokia
Fiction is less about what happens than how it’s told, and to me there’s no one else speaking quite like Tim Sanders.