EVER

Fiction. "Within the psychic architecture that is EVER, Blake Butler explores the way bodies swell and contract, going from skin to house and back again. And the way houses too shrink to fit us first like clothing and then like skin and then tighter still. The result is a strange, visionary ontological dismemberment that takes you well beyond what you'd ever expect"--Brian Evenson. "Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality"--Gary Lutz. "In EVER--as in, indicating any time in the past or future--light is entropic; 'the sky could lift your skin off'; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind fucks granting 'no exit method'; and doors won't open even when you don't try..."--Miranda Mellis.

Blake Butler is a daring invigorator of the literary sentence, and the room-ridden narrator of his debut novella, EVER, nerves her way into a hallucinative ruckus of rousing originality. --Gary Lutz

In EVER as in, indicating any time in the past or future-light is entropic; 'the sky could lift your skin off'; domestic rituals are anamorphotic mind *fugs* granting 'no exit method'; and doors won't open even when you don't try. Articulating viscera, ever inside, Butler's narrative dispatches are enclosed between parentheses like unfinished houses, the pages opening out occasionally into exquisitely burnished fields of imagery. Much in the way minerals are pushed up past the mantle by core collisions, EVER reads to me like new evidence, delicate gear that allows us to glimpse a place we've always lived but still don't know. --Miranda Mellis