Blake Butler’s favorite books of 2010
We asked our favorite Atlanta writers to tell us about their favorite books of 2010. All week long, we’ll be running their comments.
- http://clatl.com/atlanta/ImageArchives?by=1223504
- Blake Butler
We asked our favorite Atlanta writers to tell us about their favorite books of 2010. All week long, we’ll be running their comments. Blake Butler is the author of Scorch Atlas and the forthcoming There is No Year
Coma by Pierre Guyotat (Semiotext(e))
A memoir by a modern day version of Sade, this is a very intense French author’s account of having put so much of himself into his writing that he literally went into a coma. If you’re looking for something blood-stirring and brutal in a way that makes reading feel like war, you should be reading everything Guyotat has written.
Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls by Alissa Nutting (Starcherone)
This book is stuffed to hilarious excess with punks, cannibals, hellions, freaks, sluts, and weirdos. Makes you want to coat yourself in candy paint and run naked through the streets looking for somebody to knock your lights our so you can replicate the feeling of what it must have been like to live inside this book. Nutting bleeds style, and it tickles and burns.
About a Mountain by John D’Agata (W.W. Norton)
A hybrid nonfiction-conceptualrealityfantasty-observational essay about the Yucca Mountain site just north of Las Vegas where our nuclear waste is proposed to be stored, as well as his experience with a local suicide in the area. D’Agata does so much more with the potential aspects of idea and form than most would be used to in a traditional essay, expanding the notion of how you can create affect with facts and ideas by fusing them in surprising ways.
Black Life by Dorothea Lasky (Wave)
If you feel like you smothered the child you were some time in the past 10 years of weird America air, Black Life brings it back, talking through the hole if you you thought was long gone. There is some kind of triple awareness beating in this book that kind of surpasses the lyric into the squeal, but also talking to you like you like an old, wild-eyed awesome friend.
Daddy’s by Lindsay Hunter (Featherproof)
Did you see Gummo? This is like Gummo with people who live on your block, who dress as themselves for Halloween, who are hornier than you ever thought you might have been, and who give you this book so you have something sharp to hump.