Kevin Killian

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.”

Introduction by Wayne Koestenbaum

Afterword by Dodie Bellamy

This long overdue anthology of New Narrative includes both classic New Narrative texts and rare supplementary materials, allowing the movement fueled by punk, pop, porn, French theory, and social struggle to bound back to life, ripe with dramatic propulsion, to form a new map of late 20th century creative rebellion.

"Gossipy and uninhibited, its breath is hot in your ear. It wants to tell you everything, and it wants you to overshare back." — M. Milks

"One of New Narrative's all-time best jokes is about the movement itself. It's the parodic motto that Bellamy formulates in Academonia for New Narrative "at its worst" "I have sex and I'm smarter than you." But "sex without fantasy," Camille Roy posits, "is nothing." The pieces compiled in Writers Who Love Too Much don't restrict fantasy. They use, as Boone says, eros, rather than facts, as the matter of narrative. Sex and fantasy are for New Narrative the stuff of ordinary life." — Jean-Thomas Trembla

Contributors include: Steve Abbott, Kathy Acker, Michael Amnasan, Roberto Bedoya, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Benderson, Charles Bernstein, Nayland Blake, Bruce Boone, Lawrence Braithwaite, Rebecca Brown, Kathe Burkhart, Marsha Campbell, Dennis Cooper, Sam D'Allesandro, Gabrielle Daniels, Leslie Dick, Cecilia Dougherty, Bob Flanagan, Robert Glück, Judy Grahn, Brad Gooch, Carla Harryman, Richard Hawkins, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Gary Indiana, Edith A. Jenkins, Kevin Killian, Chris Kraus, R. Zamora Linmark, Eileen Myles, John Norton, F.S. Rosa, Camille Roy, Sarah Schulman, Gail Scott, David O. Steinberg, Lynne Tillman, Matias Viegener, Scott Watson, Laurie Weeks.

Fascination brings together an early memoir, 'Bedrooms Have Windows' (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, 'Bachelors Get Lonely', by the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, one of the founding members of the New Narrative movement. The two together depict the author's early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island's North Shore in the 1970s. It concludes with Triangles in the Sand, a new, previously unpublished memoir of Killian's brief affair in the 1970s with the composer Arthur Russell. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era-a time in which Richard Nixon's resignation intersected with David Bowie's 'Diamond Dogs'-from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. "Move along the velvet rope," Killian writes in 'Bedrooms Have Windows', "run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: 'You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'"

Kevin Killian's Fascination comes to us with delay, yet arrives, thankfully, as though preserved within the flaps of an unsent, sealed, and searing correspondence, consummate and irreverent, having wasted no time. With their uncompromising wit and harnessed consciousness, Killian's memoirs propose that the project of remembrance, though dotted with loss, is also one of relentless recall for relentless pleasure. Not all of Killian's memories are his, but through him they become yours; others are rewound and replayed. Killian's invitation, though we wouldn't dare to rebuff it: "Remember me!"
— Rachel Valinsky

Kevin Killian was a San Francisco-based poet, novelist, playwright, and art writer. Recent books include the poetry collections Tony Greene Era and Tweaky Village. He is the coauthor of Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. With Dodie Bellamy, he coedited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing, 1977-1997.

New Narrative pioneer Kevin Killian's novel, Spreadeagle, has been two decades in the making. Skating nimbly over the vast surface of pop history through a forest of movie stars, pop sensation and dazzling social technologies, Killian undoes the ties that bind a half-dozen Californian men—Daniel Isham, the powerful, popular gay novelist; Kit Kramer, his insecure activist boyfriend; Daniel's father, Ralph Isham, the world-renowned poet who haunts him in death; Eric Avery, the Duchamp-loving twink who wins Kit's heart; and the shadowy Radley brothers, Adam and Gary, who destroy them all. This is the great gay novel that America has been waiting for.

Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers series extends the pioneering work of Paris-based Olympia Press's Traveller's Companion series of the 1950s and 60s, which published work that had been banned or censored through moralistic prohibition. Our series presents great new work that has been effectively 'censored' by the market. In our day, the market is the definitive censor. The Fellow Travelers series proudly presents great work that the market has not endorsed, but that we believe in.

In the fall of 2017, Obe Alkema got acquainted with the American poet Kevin Killian, first at the New Narrative conference at UC Berkeley, then at the Poets & Critics Symposium in Paris that was all about his poetry. A year and a half later, Alkema traveled back to Paris, this time as a participant of a writing residency. He was there to research the landscape of memory, but more than he expected and initially realized, Kevin’s death the previous month (June 2019) affected his return. Besides inevitable, mourning and remembering became obsessions for Alkema, as he shows in ‘My Kevin, Our Paris’, a memoir about Kevin Killian (1952–2019), but especially about his Kevin and their Paris.

Already a member of The Feminist Writers’ Guild and one of the principal founders/proponents of the New Narrative movement, Dodie Bellamy published her first book with Hanuman Books in 1991. Feminine Hijinx brings together two long pieces, "Complicity" and "The Debbies I Have Known", along with a new introduction by the author, written for this reissue.

Dodie Bellamy (b. 1951) is an American writer, journalist, and educator, most often associated with the New Narrative movement. She is the author of The Letters of Mina Harker, Cunt-ups, Pink Steam, The TV Sutras, and co-edited Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative Writing 1977–1997 with Kevin Killian.

A collection of lectures transcribed from the audio archives of Naropa University's Summer Writing Program that represent a continuing lineage of experimental literary movements. 

New Weathers asks us to consider how poetics might embolden deeper engagements with the world. Collected from the alternative education zone founded by Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg with the aim of opening up discourse and fostering political engagement, these texts invoke issues of gender and race-based injustice, the global climate crisis, and our possible extinction. They weave through our poetic community, the conversations we are having, the issues we are facing—our "new weathers" to posit strategies of resistance. 

List of Contributors: Paula Gunn Allen, Amiri Baraka, Dan Beachy-Quick, Sherwin Bitsui, Robin Blaser, William S. Burroughs, Julie Carr, J'Lyn Chapman, Jos Charles, Jack Collom, Samuel R. Delany, kari edwards, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tonya M. Foster, Forrest Gander, Alan Gilbert, Allen Ginsberg, Renee Gladman, Robert Glück, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Jarnot, Kevin Killian, Thurston Moore, Fred Moten, Eileen Myles, Hoa Nguyen, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, M. NourbeSe Philip, Margaret Randall, Roger Reeves, Ariana Reines, Lisa Robertson, Ed Sanders, Andrew Schelling, Cedar Sigo, Eleni Sikelianos, Harry Smith, Edwin Torres, Cecilia Vicuña, Asiya Wadud, Peter Warshall, Eliot Weinberger, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Ronaldo V. Wilson.

In 1965, when the poet Jack Spicer died at the age of forty, he left behind a trunkful of papers and manuscripts and a few copies of the seven small books he had seen to press. A West Coast poet, his influence spanned the national literary scene of the 1950s and '60s, though in many ways Spicer's innovative writing ran counter to that of his contemporaries in the New York School and the West Coast Beat movement. Now, more than forty years later, Spicer's voice is more compelling, insistent, and timely than ever. During his short but prolific life, Spicer troubled the concepts of translation, voice, and the act of poetic composition itself.

My Vocabulary Did This to Me is a landmark publication of this essential poet's life work, and includes poems that have become increasingly hard to find and many published here for the first time.

Edited by Kevin Killian and Peter Gizzi

A collection of essays from Dodie Bellamy on disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, and profound embarrassment.

So. Much. Information. When does one expand? Cut back?  Stop researching? When is enough enough? Like Colette's aging courtesan Lea in the Chéri books, I straddle two centuries that are drifting further and further apart.—Dodie Bellamy, “Hoarding as Ecriture”

This new collection of essays, selected by Dodie Bellamy after the death of Kevin Killian, her companion and husband of thirty-three years, circles around loss and abandonment large and small. Bellamy's highly focused selection comprises pieces written over three decades, in which the themes consistent within her work emerge with new force and clarity: disenfranchisement, vulgarity, American working class life, aesthetic values, profound embarrassment. Bellamy writes with shocking, and often hilarious, candor about the experience of turning her literary archive over to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and about being targeted by an enraged online anti-capitalist stalker. Just as she did in her previous essay collection, When the Sick Rule the World, Bellamy examines aspects of contemporary life with deep intelligence, intimacy, ambivalence, and calm.

Guillaume Dustan' first three novels, published in French between 1996 and 1998, describing the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Paris still haunted by AIDS. 

This volume collects a suite of three wildly entertaining and trailblazing short novels by the legendary French anti-assimilationist LGBTQ+ writer Guillaume Dustan. Published sequentially in France between 1996 and 1998, the three novels are exuberant and deliberately affectless accounts of the narrator's sexual odyssey through a Parisian club and bath scene still haunted by AIDS.  

In My Room (1996) takes place almost entirely in the narrator's bedroom. The middle volume, I'm Going Out Tonight (1997) finds him venturing out onto the gay scene in one long night. Finally, in Stronger Than Me(1998) the narrator reflects on his early life, which coincided with the appearance and spread of the AIDS virus in France.  

A close contemporary of Dennis Cooper, Brett Easton Ellis, Kevin Killian, and Gary Indiana, Guillaume Dustan's deadpan autofiction is at once satirical and intimate, and completely contemporary.

a queer anthology of healing is a subtle, devastating mix of cuteness and embarrassment, beauty and confession, magic tricks and pain. The artworks and writings in this collection suggest that healing can be achieved through revelation, invocation, observation and disclosure. It’s a much-needed gift right now. - Chris Kraus

with Clay AD, Harry Agius, Barney Ashton-Bullock, Bodie Bellamy, Jack Bigglestone, Nick Blackburn, Helen Cammock, Charity Coleman, Swithun Cooper, Paul Gabrielli, Evan Garza, Erica Gillingham, Daniel Givens, Pete Hammond, Benedict Hawkins, Georgie Henley, Lubaina Himid, Fanny Howe, Jasmine Johnson, G.B. Jones, Kevin Killian, Wayne Koestenbaum Nic Lachance Olivia Laing, Benedict Leader, Paul Lee, Mary Manning, Ben Miller, D. Mortimer, Monique Mouton, Annie Murrells, Chuck Nanney, David Nas, Isobel Neviazsky,Paul P. , Richard Porter,Peter Scalpello, Hyacinth Schuss, Ryan Skelton, Verity Spott, Edward Thomasson, Timothy Thornton, Declan Wiffen, Ian Wooldridge

Dodie Bellamy's Cunt-Ups - first published in 2001 and recipient of the Firecracker Award for Innovative Poetry— was immediately a controversial and celebrated work. Using the "cut-up" method of William S. Burroughs, Cunt-Ups is a work of sex magick, based on source texts from old lovers and Jeffery Dahmer transcriptions. The resulting spell queers everything around it.

Dodie Bellamy's writing focuses on sexuality, politics, and narrative experimentation, challenging the distinctions between fiction, essay, and poetry. She is the 2018-19 subject of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art's On Our Mind program, a year-long series of public events, commissioned essays, and reading group meetings inspired by an artist's writing and lifework. Have a look at her collection When the Sick Rule the World, from Semiotext(e). Her essay, "The Beating of Our Hearts," was presented at the 2014 Whitney Biennial. With Kevin Killian she edited for Nightboat Books WRITERS WHO LOVE TOO MUCH: NEW NARRATIVE 1977-1997.

The seventh book in Publication Studio's Fellow Travelers Series, is a love letter between generations of queer people. Set in New York City in 2001, we follow Phillip—a gender subversive drag king in search of grace and magic—through rich, sad, humorous language that is singularly Shelley Marlow's.

Kevin Killian writes, "I've been dying for something first rate and innovative and have found this in Marlow's writing. Her hero, Phillip/Philomena...is the most enchanting and elusive central character in a novel since Cassandra in Dodie Smith's Capture the Castle. While many have compared Marlow to the late Jane Bowles, I would agree if only there was a loving and empathetic Jane Bowles, and now there is and here is her book."

Examining the genre-bending writing of Dodie Bellamy, whose work has focused on sexuality, politics, feminism, narrative experimentation, and all things queer.

Dodie Bellamy Is on Our Mind is the first major publication to address Bellamy's prolific career as a genre-bending writer. Megan Milks made several trips to San Francisco in order to spend time with Bellamy and craft a provocative and fascinating profile of the writer. Originally delivered as a lecture at the Wattis Institute, Andrew Durbin's text takes the form of a personal essay, expertly weaving anecdotes of his own encounters with Bellamy's writing with insights into broader themes in her work. Academic Kaye Mitchell takes a close look at the role of shame and its relationship to femininity in particular texts by Bellamy. And Bellamy and her late husband Kevin Killian offer deeply personal, emotionally wrenching ruminations on topics from the mundane (drawing) to the profound (mortality). These texts, alongside archival photos and a complete bibliography make, this book an important compendium on Bellamy.

Dodie Bellamy (b. 1951, in North Hammond, Indiana) has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1978. A vital contributor to the Bay Area's avant-garde literary scene, Bellamy is a novelist and poet whose work has focused on sexuality, politics, feminism, narrative experimentation, and all things queer. In her words, she champions “the vulnerable, the fractured, the disenfranchised, the fucked-up.”

Texts By: Kristen Alvanson, Stuart Bailey, Stephen Barber, Mark & Steve Beasley, Karla Black, Marianna Botey, Jesse Bransford & Casey Mckinney, Charles Bronson, Paul Buck, David Burrows & Simon O'sullivan, Bonnie Camplin, Lisa Castagner, Ccru/Orphan Drift, Dennis Cooper, Michael Corris, Esther Planas, Karen Cunningham, Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth, Michael Cross/ M Satai, John Cussans, Enrico David, Anthony Davies, Lorenzo De Los Angeles Iii, Madeline Djerjian, Peter Donaldson, Ross Downes, Electric Six, Patricia Ellis, John Espinosa, Dick Evans, Keith Farquhar, Dan Fox, Luca Frei, Barnaby Furnas & Ivette Zieghelboim, Tony Garifalakis, Babak Ghazi, Ilana Halperin, Mark Harris, Iain Hetherington, Damien Hirst, Klara Hobza, Stewart Home, Rachel Howe, Mark Hulson, Andy Hunt, Andrew Hughes, Gareth Jones, Kevin Killian, Kool Keith, Steve Klee, The Knockouts, Pete Lewis, Cedar Lewisohn, Fiona Lumbers, Patricia Macormack, Andrea Mason, Natt Mellors, Anna Mitchell, N.R.K Mohammad/ Sos Newsrod/ Dan Thurwen, Gean Moreno, Hv Morton, Donal Mosher, Neil Mulholland, Patrick Mullins, Yuki Muruyama, Reza Negarestani, No Bra, Paul Noble, Bernard Noel, David Osbaldeston/Joe Devlin, Arthur Ou, Mike Pare, Chloe Piene, Esther Planas, Elizabeth Price, Adam Putnam, Harry Pye, Hillary Raphael, The Rebel, Steve Rushton/Hubert Czerepok, Amelia Saul/Jo-Ey Tang, Kenji Siratori, Craig Slee, Alison Smith, Emma Stark, John Strutton, Francis Summers, Rebecca Taylor, Simon Thompson, Mark Tichner, Ian Titus, Dan Torop, Jeffrey Vallance, Harlan D Wilson, Benny Zadik.

Texts By: Kathy Acker, Mireille Andrès, Antonin Artaud, Dominique Auch, Ned Baldwin, Stephen Barber, Georges Bataille, Baudelaire, John Beagles, Mark Beasley, Dodie Bellamy, Alissa Bennett, Simon Bill, Jesse Bransford, R.A.Bransford Jr Esq, Paul Buck, Bonnie Camplin, Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Dennis Cooper, John Cussans, Trinie Dalton, Sue De Beer, Brock Enright, Felix Ensslin, Dan Fox, Robert Garnett, Paul Green, Matthew Greene, Fernando Guerreiro, Pierre Guyotat, Ilana Halperin, Glen Helfand, Jacques Henric, Rachel Howe, Ben Kaleb Brantley, Seth Kelly, Kevin Killian, Christopher Knowles, Jennifer Krasinski, Cedar Lewisohn, Lorenzo De Los Angeles Iii, Rachel Lowther, Dave Martin, Karl Marx, Casey Mckinney, Gean Moreno, J.P. Munro, Paulina Olowska, Simon O¹Sullivan, Arthur Ou, Damon Packard, Mike Paré, Graham Parker, Wotjek Puslowski, Adam Putnam, Ian Rafael Titus, Eugène Savitzkaya, Eric Schnell, Amy Sillman, Allison Smith, Joanne Tatham/ Tom O'sullivan, Daniel Torop, Genya Turovsky, Banks Violette, Benjamin Weissman, Ivan Witenstein, Thom Wolf