No Year of the Cat

No Year of the Cat
Author: Mary Dodson Wade
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2013-06-01
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1627531076

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The Emperor has a problem. He wants his people to remember the year in which his son was born. But there is no way to keep track of the years. So the Emperor devises a race in which animals will cross a river. The first twelve animals to reach the opposite side will have a year named after them. Thus, the people will be able to remember the years and the events that occurred. And so the race is set. Rat, knowing he is no match for the rushing water, schemes with Cat on how to cross the river. Together the two convince Ox to carry them across. But halfway across the river, Rat shows his true colors. Will Cat make it to the other side? Which animals will have a year named after them? Accompanied by exquisite watercolor artwork, this charming story explains the origins of the Chinese calendar.

There Is No Year

There Is No Year
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011-04-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780061997426

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A family of three: father, mother, son. A house that gives them shelter but shapes their nightmares. An illness that nearly arrested the past, and looms over the future. A second family—a copy family. Mirror bodies. Events on the horizon: a hole, a box, a light, a girl. Holes in houses. Holes in speaking. Holes in flesh. Memories that deceive and figures that tempt and lure and withdraw. There Is No Year is the astonishing new novel by Blake Butler. It is a world of scare, a portrait of return, a fable of survival and the fierce burden of art.

Scorch Atlas

Scorch Atlas
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2010-06-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 145876186X

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In this striking novel-in-stories, a series of strange apocalypses have hit America. Entire neighborhoods drown in mud, glass rains from the sky, birds speak gibberish, and parents of young children disappear. Millions starve while others grow coats of mold. But a few are able to survive and find a light in the aftermath, illuminating what we've become. In ''the Disappeared,''a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. A boy swells to fill his parents' ransacked attic in ''the Ruined Child.'' Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler's full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William H. Gass, yet imbued with Butler's own vision of the apocalyptic and bizarre.

There Is No Year

There Is No Year
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2011-06-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062087320

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"Butler is an original force who is fearless with form. . . . [an] inventive and deeply promising young author." —Time Out New York "[Butler's] sentences. . . twist and evolve, and there's a perverse joy that comes from watching just how his paragraphs are shaped, of tracing their contractions and rhythms." —Flavorpill With echoes of Justin Taylor, Tony O’Neill, and Dennis Cooper, breakout novelist Blake Butler delivers a wildly inventive, impressionistic novel of family, sickness, and the wrenching birth of art. Evocative of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and the films of David Lynch, There Is No Year offers a fractured, dystopian parable about the struggle and survival of art, identity, and family. As the Toronto Globe and Mail says, “if the distortion and feedback of Butler's intense riffing is too loud, you may very well be too boring.”

Alice Knott

Alice Knott
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2020-07-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525535233

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Named one of the Best Books of 2020 by Refinery29 A hypnotic, wildly inventive novel about art, violence, and endurance Alice Knott lives alone, a reclusive heiress haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious near-identical brother. Much of her family’s fortune has been spent on a world-class collection of artwork, which she stores in a vault in her lonely, cavernous house. One day, she awakens to find the artwork destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow and the world’s most priceless works of art are destroyed one by one, Alice finds that she has become the chief suspect in an international conspiracy—even as her psyche becomes a shadowed landscape of childhood demons and cognitive disorder. Unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well as a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose trials feel both apocalyptic and universal.

300,000,000

300,000,000
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062271865

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An unforgettable novel of an American suburb devastated by a fiendish madman—the most ambitious and important work yet by “the 21st century answer to William Burroughs” (Publishers Weekly). Blake Butler’s fiction has dazzled readers with its dystopian dreamscapes and swaggering command of language. Now, in his most topical and visceral novel yet, he ushers us into the consciousness of two men in the shadow of a bloodbath: Gretch Gravey, a cryptic psychopath with a small army of burnout followers, and E. N. Flood, the troubled police detective tasked with unpacking and understanding his mind. A mingled simulacrum of Charles Manson, David Koresh, and Thomas Harris’s Buffalo Bill, Gravey is a sinister yet alluring God figure who enlists young metal head followers to kidnap neighboring women and bring them to his house—where he murders them and buries their bodies in a basement crypt. Through parallel narratives, Three Hundred Million lures readers into the cloven mind of Gravey—and Darrel, his sinister alter ego—even as Flood’s secret journal chronicles his own descent into his own, eerily similar psychosis. A portrait of American violence that conjures the shadows of Ariel Castro, David Koresh, and Adam Lanza, Three Hundred Million is a brutal and mesmerizing masterwork, a portrait of contemporary America that is difficult to turn away from, or to forget.

There Are No Shortcuts

There Are No Shortcuts
Author: Rafe Esquith
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2008-11-19
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0307491803

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Year after year, Rafe Esquith’s fifth-grade students excel. They read passionately, far above their grade level; tackle algebra; and stage Shakespeare so professionally that they often wow the great Shakespearen actor himself, Sir Ian McKellen. Yet Esquith teaches at an L.A. innercity school known as the Jungle, where few of his students speak English at home, and many are from poor or troubled families. What’s his winning recipe? A diet of intensive learning mixed with a lot of kindness and fun. His kids attend class from 6:30 A.M. until well after 4:00 P.M., right through most of their vacations. They take field trips to Europe and Yosemite. They play rock and roll. Mediocrity has no place in their classroom. And the results follow them for life, as they go on to colleges such as Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford. Possessed by a fierce idealism, Esquith works even harder than his students. As an outspoken maverick of public education (his heroes include Huck Finn and Atticus Finch), he admits to significant mistakes and heated fights with administrators and colleagues. We all—teachers, parents, citizens—have much to learn from his candor and uncompromising vision.

Sky Saw

Sky Saw
Author: Blake Butler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: Dystopias
ISBN: 9780985023508

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Another disturber from the author of Nothing and There Is No Year.

The Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking
Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2007-02-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307279723

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.

Been There, Survived That

Been There, Survived That
Author: Karen Macklin
Publisher: Zest Books
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2008-05-01
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0979017378

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Everyone knows that the first year of high school can be daunting. But you will come out of it alive - and this book can help. Inside, four real teens fill you in on the stuff they wish they’d known. Among other things, there’s advice on how to assimilate into your new social kingdom, deal with failure, survive the lunchroom, create good excuses, and fake sick days. Divided into social, academic, and practical sections of advice, Been There, Survived That also includes humorous tips on what NOT to do, and funny freshman year horror stories. Sure, cafeteria food is always scary, but high school doesn’t have to be.