Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of My Kevin, My Paris

Self-Published

My Kevin, My Paris

Obe Alkema

€8.00

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.

recommendations

Cover of Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Self-Published

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

Edwin A. Abbot

Fiction €12.00

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is an 1884 satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott. Writing pseudonymously as "A Square," the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to offer pointed observations on the social hierarchy of Victorian culture. However, the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.

Several films have been made from the story, including a feature film in 2007 called Flatland. Other efforts have been short or experimental films, including one narrated by Dudley Moore and the short films Flatland: The Movie and Flatland 2: Sphereland starring Martin Sheen and Kristen Bell.

Cover of Economy as Intimacy (vol.2)

Self-Published

Economy as Intimacy (vol.2)

Eric Peter

I I C / The Contract / Ellipsis / Delbaram / Booos / U OK?
Cover of Suckcess Magazine 1 — Winter 2021-22

Self-Published

Suckcess Magazine 1 — Winter 2021-22

Kevin Desbouis

Poetry €10.00

Drama, careers, sabotage, compromises... The first issue of Suckcess Magazine begins with a selection of poems by the flamboyant Rene Ricard, edited with the help of Editions Lutanie, and continues with contributions from Miriam Laura Leonardi, Fabienne Audéoud, Camille Aleña, Gabi Losoncy, David Lieske, Sylvie Fanchon, Won Jin Choi, Estelle Hoy, and Bunny Rogers. Cartoons and tennis players are also on the program.

Cover of Les Metamorpheauxses

Self-Published

Les Metamorpheauxses

Laurianne Bixhain

Zines €14.00

Publié en 2025 dans le cadre du projet d'art public The River as Habitat installé dans le Lycée Edward Steichen, Clervaux et commandité par l'administration des bâtiments publics, Luxembourg.

Cover of Riding In Silence & The Crying Dervish

Self-Published

Riding In Silence & The Crying Dervish

Mashid Mohadjerin

The work of Iranian-Belgian artist Mashid Mohadjerin (°1976, Teheran) is an intricate tapestry of personal and collective memory, weaving together photography, text, video, and archival material to explore themes of displacement, resistance, and identity.

Family chronicles merge with momentous political events and are set against the background of a broader history of the MENA-region. Mohadjerin uncovers invisible nuances hidden beneath the extraordinary and the familiar.

In Riding in Silence & The Crying Dervish (2025), Mashid Mohadjerin draws from the depths of her family history, unraveling the echoes of migration, forced departures, and the quiet endurance of those caught between worlds. The book builds on her previous work, Freedom is Not Free (2021), where she explored the role of women in movements of resistance across the MENA region. However, in this latest series, she turns her gaze towards the intersection of masculinity, political ideology, and displacement, examining how historical forces shape personal narratives in ways both visible and unseen.

Cover of Impossible Princess

City Lights Books

Impossible Princess

Kevin Killian

LGBTQI+ €16.00

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

Cover of Selected Amazon Reviews

Semiotext(e)

Selected Amazon Reviews

Kevin Killian

LGBTQI+ €34.00

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

Cover of Bewogen selfies

het balanseer

Bewogen selfies

Obe Alkema

Fiction €24.50

In Bewogen selfies onderzoekt Obe Alkema de verhouding tussen landschap en herinnering. Wat treft hij aan bij terugkeer naar belangrijke plaatsen uit zijn geheugen? Wat herinnert hij zich niet, maar Google wel? Is er een gedenkschrift te puren uit zijn metadata?

Memoires, rechtstreeks verteld en met omwegen, uit eerste hand en van horen zeggen. Archieven en herinneringen eisen spreektijd, houden het niet meer droog of worden tot spreken gebracht. Wat hebben ze eigenlijk te melden? Ze lopen helemaal leeg, net als Alkema zelf. Een leven zoals zovele, poedelnaakt en geretoucheerd, vol zin en onzin.