Alice Knott

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.

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

The epic made simple. The miracle in the mundane. One day, while browsing an antique store in Helena, Montana, photographer Tyler Knott Gregson stumbled upon a vintage Remington typewriter for sale. Standing up and using a page from a broken book he was buying for $2, he typed a poem without thinking, without planning, and without the ability to revise anything. He fell in love. Three years and almost one thousand poems later, Tyler is now known as the creator of the Typewriter Series: a striking collection of poems typed onto found scraps of paper or created via blackout method. Chasers of the Light features some of his most insightful and beautifully worded pieces of work—poems that illuminate grand gestures and small glimpses, poems that celebrate the beauty of a life spent chasing the light.

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.

'A hilarious account of life with the children of the super rich...well written...and very funny indeed' - BOOK OF THE WEEK Daily Mail 'A hilarious, behind-the-scenes memoir of the mad world of the very rich' Daily Telegraph 'Very funny...the book bursts with butlers, helicopters and Damien Hirsts' The Times 'There are so many laughs in this book, you almost forget how upsetting capitalism is' Simon Amstell A naked Russian oligarch is spanking me in his basement. His weapon is a birch branch, the setting his luxurious home sauna. Above us is 30,000 square feet of one of Moscow's most obscene private homes, an original Damien Hirst above the fireplace, a vacuum cleaning system built into the skirting boards. Invisible speakers serenade us with a desolate pan pipe cover of 'Bridge Over Troubled Water'. A light display rotates kaleidoscopically, illuminating the oligarch's genitals in a variety of unexpected hues. Everyone is silent. Then the oligarch's son Nikita looks at me with a mysterious smile. 'Now my mother will bring us honey.' Matt Knott spent over a decade traveling the globe as a private tutor. He has taught Shakespeare in Moscow, times tables in Tuscany, and is still trying to figure out how to explain long division. With brilliant honesty and wit, he takes us inside a world most of us only glimpse speeding past in a luxury SUV. Unfolding across four continents and featuring a colourful cast of butlers, billionaires and yummy mummies, this is a hilarious and touching chronicle of an unforgettable time.

A collection of aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism. Composed of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Eugene Thacker’s Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and tinged with gallows humor, Thacker’s writing tenuously hovers over that point at which the thought of futility becomes the futility of thought.

"Dear Incomprehension tackles a broad swath of contemporary literature currently labeled "speculative fiction." A blurring of genres that includes science fiction, modern fairy tales, and avant-garde experimental fiction, these works are extremely popular but also derive from highly sophisticated philosophical and aesthetic sensibilities, ones that call into question and uproot the very foundations of stories and storytelling. Because such fictions subvert most conventional narrative devices-plot, recognizable characters, verisimilitude, logic, legibility-they deliberately confound almost any kind of conventional reading and criticism. So, what do you do with a text that cannot be conventionally read or understood? To do such a literature justice, the traditional frameworks of literary criticism fail, and Dear Incomprehension is more of an extended philosophical essay than it is a traditional work of criticism, as oblique and unconventional in its voice, tone, and methods as the texts it illuminates"--