Tyrant Books – förlag

"If there''s a more thoroughly brilliant and exciting new writer than Blake Butler . . . well, there just isn''t."—Dennis Cooper

"Blake Butler, mastermind and visionary, has sneaked up and drugged the American novel."—Ben Marcus

I could go on at what these days were but the truth is I am tired. Would you even believe me if I did or didn''t? Could this paper touch your face? I''ve spent enough years with my face arranged in books. I''ve read enough to crush my sternum. In each of the books are people talking, saying the same thing, their tongues thin and white and speckled.

I don''t want to be here. I want to get older. I want to see my skin go folding over.

Someday I plan to die.

Books that reappear when you destroy them, lampshades made of skin, people named with numbers and who can''t recall each other, a Universal Ceiling constructed by an otherwise faceless authority, a stairwell stuffed with birds: the terrain and populace of Sky Saw is packed with stroboscopic memory mirage. In dynamic sentences and image, Blake Butler crafts a post-Lynchian nightmare where space and family have deformed, leaving the human persons left in the strange wake to struggle after the shapes of both what they loved and who they were.

Blake Butler is the author of Ever, Scorch Atlas, There Is No Year, and Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia. He is the editor of the literary blog HTMLGIANT.

"Michael Kimball is a hero of contemporary fiction." —Sam Lipsyte

A husband wakes up to find his wife has had a seizure during the night. His wife is rushed to a hospital where she lies in a coma. By day, the husband sits beside his wife and tries to think of ways to wake her up. The husband sleeps in the chair next to his wife''s bedside dreaming that she will wake up. He wants to be able to take her back home.

Michael Kimball is author of The Way the Family Got Away, Dear Everybody, and the forthcoming Ray.

"Sam Michel is such a smart, manic, virtuosic stylist . . . the kind of deep insights that make you suddenly and newly appreciative of the world around you."—George Saunders

There was a hot, high sun, a hard ground and a long way off to any certain water, and my wife, a tenderfoot, I thought, not immodest, seemed bent on ruined feet and spectacle, on making of herself to passing innocents a living proof of what could happen to a man and woman ventured too far off alone together in the desert. Yet who passed? Who could be so innocent? Snakes and ravens, rabbits, buzzards, toads-- these passed, these witnessed, and what could they have made from us?...I saw myself preceded by my wife. I wanted to follow her, feel what she felt; I thought that I might find myself absolved… Maybe I would get some. Somewhere in me was a cheerful voice assuring me that what this needed was our getting laid.

Here is the head of his home—the one to speak, surely—on the occasion of his son Lincoln Dahl Jr.''s fifth birthday. Wife and mother order him to engage with his boy, but he remains in his chair dreaming up the speech he''ll give to convey his life and glory to his boy, meanwhile avoiding his child and all others, until forced from his chair. Here''s cowboy Beckett, a man of wonder and excess.

Sam Michel is the author of Under the Light and Big Dogs and Flyboys.

Both coming-of-age story and cautionary tale. In her mother''s absence, Jean is torn between the adult world and her surreal fantasies of escape as she and Fender build a fort to survey the rumors of their town.

Annie DeWitt is a fiction writer, essayist, and critic. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts. She teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Believer, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, NOON (where an excerpt of this novel first appeared), BOMB, Electric Literature, and the American Reader, among others. Her story "Influence," which first appeared in Esquire''s Napkin Fiction Project, was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology, edited by Alan Ziegler (Persea, 2014). DeWitt was a co-founding editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the United States and abroad. She currently pens a bimonthly nonfiction column about art, literature, film and criticism for the Believer, called "Various Paradigms."