Ever [Perfect Paperback]

Blake Butler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2009

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)

Editorial Reviews

Review

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

Product Details

• Perfect Paperback: 104 pages
• Publisher: Calamari Press (January 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0979808065
• ISBN-13: 978-0979808067
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 5.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #726,543 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars On Ever, February 20, 2009

By 

K. Baumann - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ever (Perfect Paperback)

I'm going to begin and end this review with this recommendation: Buy and read EVER by Blake Butler.

Here is why, and briefly:

EVER is a story of mud and light and houses and metaphysical shifts in conscious, shifts in body and being and time. EVER is a story that leaves you feeling bruised and emotional and larger than you were before.

Blake Butler's sentences are often better and more pleasing than those of Lutz, McCarthy & to those of Williams and Lish. I feel Butler's sentences have a more aggressive sonic imperative. As you read, you really are (to use one of EVER's frequent words) slushed along by sentences heavily marked by S's. And when Butler reverts to a sonically dull sentence, often containing the most poignant/banal remark, the words hit you that much harder, because of the impact of all contained behind that sentence slamming forward into you. And when the tone and composition of the sentences and paragraphs shifts, you feel it. It's a visceral change.

The ideas contained in EVER expanded my thought on words, on lyricism and style, on literature. EVER is affective and brutal and beautiful. EVER is a highly creative work that truly feels original, feels new.

Buy and read EVER by Blake Butler.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bent meditation, rare stimulation, altogether wow., June 1, 2009

By 

John Domini (Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ever (Perfect Paperback)

Blake Butler brings off sentences that at once estrange & seduce, their phrasing & pacing like some 21st-Century resurrection of the Middle English, constructed w/ an ear to assonance & buried rhymes. From the second page of EVER: "In the light my skin was see-through -- my veins an atlas spanned in tissue." Not much later, more pugnaciously: "Streams of night might gleam like glass. The dirt would swim with foam." Appreciation of this small, scary miracle depends on appreciation of such beveled gems, the bits & pieces of which it's composed. Myself, I might as well've been knocked from my horse on the road to Damascus, & what floored me is also a miracle of compression. EVER contains only occasional full pages of prose, indeed it features a central sequence on which there are no more than a few lines per page, & it has interstititial designs to boot, faint gray hints of Gorey, breaking up the novella still further. Yet I find gleanings of story enough to sustain me. EVER tracks a soiled Alice (unnamed, actually) through the looking-glass & way beyond, drawn on by a force she can't understand, & that may eventually destroy her. But first she travels through room after room of a phantasmagoric home. Sample: "The next room was made of wobble. Magnetic tape streaming from the rafters, bifurcating blonde split-ends. Cashed." (& the rest of the page runs blank... inviting meditation, perhaps?) Strange as EVER's house-tour is, though, it nonetheless recalls a classic turn of the mind, the psychological phenomenon sometimes called "the dream of rooms." Such dreams can occur at any age, but they're most common near the end of life, as a person revisits all the arenas of experience. Garcia Marquez makes brilliant use of this phenomenon, for instance, when he anticipates the death of Jose Arcadio Buendia in 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE. A more compatible figure for Butler's well-paced nightmare, however, would be Beckett's Malone, since if this girl too is dying, it's of some illness or wound she can never understand, in a place she can't say how she reached, & yet it's these very same gaps of self or soul that help her achieve a perverse assumption to heaven -- & the reader's along with her.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remarkable Debut Ficction, January 27, 2009

By 

Michael Hemmingson (Ross Island, Antarctica) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Ever (Perfect Paperback)

A fascinating first novel, or novella, or book, whatever you want to call it: text, fiction, leaves with words. In many ways, EVER is a response to the textual explorations of Mark Z. Danielewski's HOUSE OF LEAVES in its use of layout, illustrations, and the theme of interior spaces and the human psyche's reaction to such.

Butler has been making a niche for his writing in many leading journals, print and on-line, and it's a good time for him to move into having his own volumes. This is a remarkable debut for a writer to watch.