WATCH: A Star-Studded Reading of Blake Butler’s Alice Knott
As Read by Laura Van Den Berg, Amber Tamblyn, Lydia Yuknavitch,
and Many Others
Riverhead Books presents a group reading of Blake Butler’s Alice Knott featuring Laura Van Den Berg, Elizabeth McCracken, Amber Tamblyn, Lydia Yuknavitch, John Darnielle, Amber Sparks, Catherine Lacey, and others. Enjoy!
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Alice Knott is both exploration of the meaning of art and the lasting afterlife of trauma, and deeply humane portrait of a woman whose trials feel both apocalyptic and universal. 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.
