Deeply honest and emotional, a family drama that by its end brings on feelings as complex and satisfying as those summoned by Faulkner’s simple sentence ‘They endured.’…This novel is a thing of such strange beauty [that it yields] the rewards that only well-made art can provide.” — New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
“A wild, poetic work.” — Time Out New York
“Dystopian and sinister. . . . In There Is No Year, Butler subverts our understanding of family relations, rendering domestic tragedy as both familiar and strange.” — Nylon Magazine
“There is no novel like There Is No Year.…Butler’s prose is persistent and perfected....His sense of humanity bleeds through the jagged edges, and by the end you’ve fallen for this nameless, deteriorating family, hoping it will survive.…Unexpectedly riveting, totally original, and frequently funny.” — Tucker Shaw, Denver Post
“Butler’s sentences are frequently dizzying and poetic, and gathered in engrossing vignette-like sections.… A challenging, Dalí-esque spin on the horror genre, a postmodern playground …There Is No Year is also often funny and insightful, further proof of Butler’s impressive and innovative talents.” — Time Out Chicago
“[An] innovative masterpiece…a haunting glimpse into a parallel universe.” — Gina Angelotti, Metro
“An endlessly surprising, funny, and subversive writer.” — Publishers Weekly
“This artfully crafted, stunning piece of nontraditional literature is recommended for contemporary literature fans looking for something out of the ordinary. Recommended for students of literature, psychology, and philosophy, as the distinctive writing style and creative insight into the minds of one family deserve analysis.” — Library Journal
“An acid burn of a lucid nightmare . . . accessible, rewarding, and engaging . . . There Is No Year can be hard as hell to read, but it’s also undeniably worth the effort.” — Candra Kolodziej, The Stranger
“If there’s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler, . . . well, there just isn’t. I’ve literally lost sleep imagining the fallout when There Is No Year drops and American fiction shifts its axis.” — Dennis Cooper
“Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel. What stumbles awake in the aftermath is feral and awesome in its power, a fairy tale of an ordinary family subjected to the strange, lonesome agony known as daily life.” — Ben Marcus
“An entirely original work that does what the best art should do: challenge the reader.…Like a 4G version of fiction[,] a metaphor for our new digital age. And like the best of dreams, There Is No Year also sticks in the brain long after the book is set down.” — The Atlantan
“If the distortion and feedback of Butler’s intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.” — Globe and Mail (Toronto)
