Blake Butler
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Blake Butler’s Knotty Novel Is Back, Retitled November 21, 2024
Void Corporation, Blake Butler’s new novel, isn’t new. He already published it under a different title, Alice Knott, in 2020. You’d be forgiven for being confused. Butler’s popular — and wrenching — 2023 memoir, Molly, was a breakthrough, for him and...
Grief’s Many Voices: On Blake Butler’s “Molly” April 01, 2024
There is a particular landscape of loss that comes from uncovering secrets about the dead. It is a landscape defined by the loss of the beloved, and then by the compounding loss of betrayal. This complex terrain has been charted in a number of popula...
Sex, Lies, and Suicide March 05, 2024
It seems heartless to discuss Blake Butler’s memoir Molly as a work of art. The story it tells involves deep trauma and grief, not to mention personal revelations that sometimes make for uncomfortable reading. Even so, Butler asks the reader to treat...
He Polarized Readers by Writing About His Late Wife February 16, 2024
From his hotel room in downtown Atlanta, Blake Butler could almost see the field where his late wife, the poet Molly Brodak, shot and killed herself in March 2020. “Every time I’ve come here since, I’ve driven to our old house. I’ve driven past where...
Lady Lazarus February 07, 2024
IN THE POEM “POST,” from her posthumously published collection, The Cipher, Molly Brodak writes:The dead come backnot for you, for themselves,to hear their own stories for the first time.I couldn’t shake the feeling while reading Molly—writer Blake B...
