While re-reading Blake Butler’s 300,000,00, a 2014 novel boasting the best prose of the New Millennium and the lest substantial review record in memory, I came across the syllabus of what would be a year-long course in American Literature — mired among the murder of so many millions of millions.

Butler’s Syllabus is a set of references so well embedded in the elusively nauseating “plot” of the novel that I doubt any reader has even gotten to the pages 364-367 in which the references are found. And even then, the reader must wade through “jungle gym garage door flowchart bodies adhesive bandage bodies water” and “particle accelerator car audio Carl Panzram kills at least twenty-one and sodomizes at least a thousand” in order to isolate the gems.

Lucky for you, I have saved you from potentially losing your mind to Mr. Butler’s. If I may say, I understand precisely what the action and spirit of this novel recognizes (for it can only be understood intuitively and esoterically). But as for America at large, this understanding will be lost, and all of America will go down to wallow amidst the fantasy of its own misunderstanding. Let, then, this curriculum be Bulter’s final testament of writing, down the last word, in America:

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans

William Gaddis, The Recognitions

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest