Margins
Alice Knott book cover
Alice Knott
2020
First Published
3.51
Average Rating
320
Number of Pages

From the ingenious mind of a language master: a wildly inventive novel about art, surveillance, our age of viral violence—and one woman's psychic survival A troubled, reclusive heiress, Alice Knott lives alone, haunted by memories of her deceased parents and mysterious, near-identical brother. Much of her 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 several of her most prized artworks destroyed, the act of vandalism captured in a viral video that soon triggers a rash of copycat incidents. As more videos follow, and an astonishing legacy of international art hangs in the balance, 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. Hallucinatory, unsettling, almost physically immersive, Alice Knott is a mind-bending rabbit hole of a narrative: a virtuoso exploration of the meaning of art, the corporatization of culture, and the lasting afterlife of trauma, as well a deeply humane portrait of a woman whose struggles feel both fantastically apocalyptic and dangerously, universally real.

Avg Rating
3.51
Number of Ratings
287
5 STARS
28%
4 STARS
26%
3 STARS
22%
2 STARS
15%
1 STARS
8%
goodreads

Author

Blake Butler
Blake Butler
Author · 14 books
Blake Butler is the author of EVER, Scorch Atlas, and two books forthcoming in 2011 and 2012 from Harper Perennial. He edits 'the internet literature magazine blog of the future' HTML Giant. His other writing have appeared in The Believer, Unsaid, Fence, Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009. He lives in Atlanta.
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