Banal Nightmare

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What to expect

'So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant' ZADIE SMITH

'Butler's sense of humour should be studied and celebrated' DAVID SEDARIS

Margaret Anne ('Moddie') Yance has just returned to her hometown, to mingle with the friends of her youth, to get back in touch with her roots, and to recover from a stressful decade of living in the city in a small apartment with a man she now believed to be a megalomaniac or perhaps a covert narcissist.

Back home, Moddie throws herself at the mercy of her old friends, all suddenly tipping toward middle age. She joins them as they go to parties, size each other up, obsess over past slights, dream of wild triumphs, and indulge in elaborate revenge fantasies.

But when a mysterious artist arrives in town to take up a residency at the local university, Moddie has no choice but to confront the demons of her past and grapple with the reality of what her life has become.

The inimitable Halle Butler, author of The New Me, returns with a novel that is sadistically precise, completely singular and horribly funny

Critics Review

Banal Nightmare will end summer with a bang. It's about turning 37 and realising you hate everybody you know. So funny, so smart, utterly vicious - just brilliant
Zadie Smith
The Feel Bad Novel of the Year . . . darkly humorous and brutally honest
Electric Lit
Halle Butler is one of the funniest and most exacting novelists of millennial precarity. Banal Nightmare is worth reading just to experience Butler's virtuosic prose. Deadpan, hyper-articulate, quietly affecting
Guardian
Butler has crafted a novel in which every character proves to be completely, uniquely crazy. Her sense of humour should be studied and celebrated
David Sedaris
So searingly precise in its ability to capture a certain moment or experience that you have to stop every few pages to send another perfect quote to your group chat . . . It will be immediately and uncomfortably relatable to anyone who has spent nights chain-smoking on a balcony, contemplating their own personal, sexual and social mistakes
New York Times
Highly intelligent, witty and completely precise in its skewering
Susannah Dickey, author of Tennis Lessons
I loved Banal Nightmare. I was laughing and underlining and laughing. I'm recommending it to so many people. Halle Butler is an absolute genius
Nicole Flattery, author of Show Them a Good Time
In Halle Butler's world, everyone hates each other, every day is excruciating in its mundanity, every thought is the beginning of an Escherian journey round and round in hell, and somehow the whole thing is unbelievably funny. With the force of an episode of marijuana psychosis and the extreme detail of a hyperrealistic work of art, Banal Nightmare attempts transcendence through anxiety and dissociation, nailing a series of contemporary characters - better pray you're not one of them - to the wall
Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror
Brilliantly observed and unsparing, Banal Nightmare is an intense, exhilarating, often-hilarious kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary relationships. With the comprehensive social gaze of Balzac and the cold logic of Renata Adler, Halle Butler conjures a latticework structure of life, rage, dark humor, and incalculable grace
Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Oh man, this book! Halle Butler's new novel is a blistering assault on contemporary pieties about art and love, an epic Woolfian tapestry of perfect comic rants, terrifying panic attacks, and, most gratifying of all, sincere attempts at human connection. This is the best, most ambitious book yet by one of my favourite writers
Andrew Martin, author of Early Work
Halle Butler's Banal Nightmare is a masterpiece, her best book yet. It burns with a wild, unforgiving fire, making most other novels seem vague and ho-hum in comparison. This novel exhibits an eerily spot-on understanding of the private mind as it delves deep into an array of lives, revealing harrowing experiences of loneliness, love, heartbreak, abuse, malaise, depression, obsession, hatred, and revenge. No feeling is skipped over. No thought is simplified. No idea is dumbed down. Like a knife dancing through air, it's a manic, nerve-wracking read, painful and so weirdly funny. I felt gripped by it from beginning to end . . . an unapologetic, totally original, modern marvel
Rachel B. Glaser, author of Paulina & Fran
Butler's talent lies in depicting how these sore winners think, and the quiet madness that comes from measuring every interaction in your life by what might be gained in power and status . . . Her most accomplished novel
New York Review of Books
Butler writes with a bee-sting-sharp sense of humor and irony, and nothing is sacred, not Hillary Clinton, not Ruth Bader Ginsburg, not Christine Blasey Ford's testimony before Congress. What's most surprising is that this cooler-than-the-cool-kids novel actually has an emotional center that will make your pulse race. . . . A tart, irreverent rant of a novel that takes a sharp turn toward something more serious
Kirkus Reviews
The voice of a (tired, furious, disappointed, disoriented) generation
LitHub
Butler is a master at constructing a detailed social hierarchy of educated women . . . I laughed out loud
Chicago Reader
A brilliantly funny dissection of adult life. Relatable, even if you don't want it to be
Our Culture
Banal Nightmare is actually funny. Reader, I laughed many times. It doesn't merely gesture to humour. Butler has comic range
The Times
Putting a new spin on what it means to be a killjoy, Bulter delivers an emotionally riveting account of modern adulthood
Booklist
A skilled and clever prose stylist who humanely spotlights the most ridiculous parts of being alive in this surprising and hilarious book
Vulture

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