Banal Nightmare | Halle Butler

336 pages | Random House | 8.26.25

A “vividly, chillingly current” (The Washington Post) novel by the author of The New Me, one of the boldest voices in American fiction.

In a Midwestern college town at the height of the Me Too era, a group of simultaneously self-flagellating and self-aggrandizing pseudo-academics sit around, think, and send one another insulting emails. As the impulses and memories they have barely managed to repress begin to surface, their relationships become increasingly deranged. Banal Nightmare captures the volatile, surreal, and entirely disorienting atmosphere of the modern era.