Blake Butler
Creepy Witch Lit Is Out There, Just Not Easy to Find
These two new little spell books are the right kind of messed up.
It's Time to Rethink the Crime Genre
Everybody loves stories about crime, particularly murder, and the uncanny rituals and oddities that go along with any profane act. It’s so effective as source material that most books or shows don’t bother to play with the form itself at all. I've...
Hill William Sings Ghost Country
Writers are traditionally very bad singers, but author Scott McClanahan is an exception to this rule. I’ve watched him silence a whole bar full of drunkards by belting out a spontaneous a cappella number more than a few times. Now his musical prowess...
American Art Needs More Holes
The biggest hindrance to American art is the inability to see anything outside our own walls. We’re proud of being a “melting pot,” but when it comes to culture not inherently American, it’s hard to convince us that we should care. Thankfully...
An Interview with Richard Garfield, Creator of Magic: The Gathering
If you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering, odds are high that you were at some point obsessed with it. Or at least I was, along with millions of others, both as a dorky teen and recently again as a ridiculous adult. A few days ago I got the chance to...
Future Harper’s Index of America
Numbers are fucked. Numbers know more about America than America knows about America. It’s as if our whole existence is a string of digits some dork imagined in his sleep and accidentally whipped into creation. By my calculations, and with a head nod...
The Uncanny Puzzles of Jesse Ball
I bought Jesse Ball’s first novel, Samedi the Deafness, in 1997 entirely because of the book jacket’s description, which compared it to Hitchcock, Kafka, and David Lynch. His latest novel, Silence Once Begun, expands the meditative, eerie...
Whoops, I Like Pro Football
This season I realized that what I used to think of as a bunch of meat slabs running around on a field is actually a highly nuanced competition, featuring insane nerds with an arsenal of some of the most athletically ridiculous people on Earth at their...
Sci-Fi Doesn't Have to Be Dominated by Horny Bro Wizards
In a genre where supposedly Anything Goes, where the boundaries of narrative and potential reality are not only immaterial, but also intended to be shattered with pure acts of what-the-fuck, I’ve always been baffled by how 90 percent of science fiction...
What Is This Terror Before Me: A Review of the New Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Nacho
Taco Bell is more like drugs than food. It beats you open from the inside with beef and cheese and bread, and in so doing makes things seem great for a while, until your body realizes what you've done to it. It’s like it’s going to save your life, and...
All the Books I Read in 2013
The literature world was weird this year. I almost don’t remember it. It was rapid, and overflowing with so many new presses and faces and legs that it was hard to know where to look and who or what didn’t suck.
I Have Voluntary Tourette’s (and Am Insane)
This is Blake’s 100th post for VICE.com, and to mark the occasion he told us he wanted to write “something more personal” than his usual fare. In that spirit, he sent us this peek inside his brain. It's crazy in there.