Selected Amazon Reviews

Selected Amazon Reviews - Hardcover

$32.95
$32.95
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Selected Amazon Reviews
  • Selected Amazon Reviews
Selected Amazon Reviews - Hardcover

Selected Amazon Reviews - Hardcover

by Kevin Killian
$32.95
$32.95

Book Overview

A book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.

An enchanting roll of duct tape. Love Actually on Blu-ray Disc. The Toaster Oven Cookbook, The Biography of Stevie Nicks, and an anthology of poets who died of AIDS. In this only book-length selection from his legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com, sagacious shopper Kevin Killian holds forth on these household essentials and many, many, many others.

The beloved author of more than a dozen volumes of innovative poetry, fiction, drama, and scholarship, Killian was for decades a charismatic participant in San Francisco's New Narrative writing circle. From 2003-2019, he was also one of Amazon's most prolific reviewers, rising to rarefied "Top 100" and "Hall of Fame" status on the site. Alternately hilarious and heartfelt, Killian's commentaries consider an incredible variety of items, each review a literary escapade hidden in plain sight amongst the retailer's endless pages of user-generated content. Selected Amazon Reviews at last gathers an appropriately wide swath of this material between two covers, revealing the project to be a unified whole and always more than a lark.

Some for "verified purchases," others for products enjoyed in theory, Killian's reviews draw on the influential strategies of New Narrative, his unrivaled fandom for both elevated and popular culture, and the fine art of fabulation. Many of them are ingeniously funny--flash-fictional riffs on the commodity as talismanic object, written by a cast of personas worthy of Pessoa. And many others are serious, even scholarly--earnest tributes to contemporaries, and to small-press books that may not have received attention elsewhere, offered with exemplary attention. All of Killian's reviews subvert the Amazon platform, queering it to his own play with language, identity, genre, critique.

Killian's prose is a consistent pleasure throughout Selected Amazon Reviews, brimming with wit, lyricism, and true affection. As the Hall of Famer himself reflected on this form-of-his-own-invention shortly before his untimely passing in 2019: "They're reviews of a sort, but they also seem like novels. They're poems. They're essays about life. I get a lot of my kinks out there, on Amazon."
ISBN9781635902181
Author Kevin Killian
PublisherSemiotext(e)
GenreLiterature
FormatHardcover
PublishedNovember 2024
LanguageENG- English
Pages704
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Literary Criticism Nonfiction

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About Kevin Killian

A founder and former director of Small Press Traffic, Kevin Killian was a hidden favorite of gay literary San Francisco. He was the author of many books including the PEN award-winning Little Men (1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001), Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997), Spread Eagle (2010), Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and Action Kylie (2008), a collection of poems inspired by Kylie Minogue. He co-wrote the Jack Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God (1998) and co-edited several volumes of Spicer's work, including My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008). With his wife Dodie Bellamy, he edited the long-running poetry zine Mirage/Periodical. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others, Best American Poetry 1988 (ed. John Ashbery), and Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper). Impossible Princess won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Erotic Fiction. Kevin Killian died on June 15th, 2019.

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