butler higgs place one coverOne
Written by Blake Butler and Vanessa Place
Assembled by Christopher Higgs

ISBN 9781931824477
Fiction, 150 pp., paperback
Roof Books

$16.95: Small Press Distribution | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Books-A-Million

From the room inside the room, from the house inside the house, memories of a one-legged father and various acts of jurisprudence haunt the mysterious creature who writhes in somatic isolation from one waking nightmare to another. Here, two writers have produced textual bodies, one speaking for the interior and the other describing the exterior, while a third writer has assembled these two bodies into a single grotesque symphony of chimerical language. A hitherto unprecedented collaborative experiment, One defies categorization and heralds a new approach to exploring the boundaries of authorship and narrative.

In theory or even usually, three contemporary majors like Butler, Higgs, and Place interlocking works inside a single book would leave users fannishly dissecting more than reading, but One is something way else.  It’s as sublimely integrated as any single-minded novel I can think of, but with this absolutely crazy mega-wattage. I.e., not since Ashbery and Schuyler co-made A Nest of Ninnies, but, whoa, even more so.

– Dennis Cooper