{"product_id":"selected-amazon-reviews-isbn-9781635902181","title":"Selected Amazon Reviews","description":"\u003cb\u003eA book-length selection from Kevin Killian's legendary corpus of more than two thousand product reviews posted on Amazon.com.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn enchanting roll of duct tape. \u003ci\u003eLove Actually\u003c\/i\u003e on Blu-ray Disc. \u003ci\u003eThe Toaster Oven Cookbook\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Biography of Stevie Nicks\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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. \u003ci\u003eSelected Amazon Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome 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. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKillian’s prose is a consistent pleasure throughout \u003ci\u003eSelected Amazon Review\u003c\/i\u003es, 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.”\u003cb\u003eIncluded in \u003ci\u003ethe Washington Post'\u003c\/i\u003es 50 notable works of nonfiction from 2024\u003cbr\u003eIncluded in \u003ci\u003ethe New Yorker'\u003c\/i\u003es Best Books of 2024 list\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Killian’s largely five-star reviews of books, movies, poetry, CDs and the occasional object he may or may not have actually purchased […] are learned, often laugh-out-loud funny, frequently moving, guilelessly enthusiastic and intellectually generous. The biggest laugh is that he conceived of a way to produce a wholly idiosyncratic art project on the ground of corporate real estate. In doing so he subverted the essentially cynical egotism of capitalism and reasserted art as, always and ever, communal.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, \u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"And then, quite brilliantly, there are Killian’s reviews of sundry consumer products, unrelated to art or culture. (Reader, if you’re dithering over the six-hundred-plus pages and the hardback sticker price, these pieces are themselves alone worth the price of admission.)\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Brian Dillon, \u003ci\u003e4Columns\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eSelected Amazon Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e is not just a conceptual art work, or a literary hoax. Killian’s reviews are brimming with genuine pleasure, and also a wonderment and ardor for the great variety of stuff on the Web site.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Oscar Schwartz, \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"These queer, brief pieces are the delicious fruits of a career spent wading through America’s gleaming cultural waste and finding other beating hearts and curious minds among the wreckage.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Daniel Felsenthal, \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Part diary entry, part long-form prose poetry, part fictional biography. Think David Sedaris meets choice.com.au. The Roger Ebert of everyday stuff, if Roger Ebert was an avant-garde poet who sometimes made things up because life was more interesting that way.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—James Shackell, \u003ci\u003eThe Story\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"It’ll be some time before any contemporary reviewer matches Killian’s achievement here. \u003ci\u003eSelected Amazon Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e is much more than a selection of product reviews: it reads as a remembrance of things past, a fine example of writing as a lived experience, and a testament to one man’s vivid impressions of the everyday.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Ian Sansom, \u003ci\u003eThe Telegraph\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"The best critics are those who meet and surpass the bounds of their object of evaluation, and Kevin Killian is of a sort who makes you want to be a better critic: more honest, more precise, more playful.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Tausif Noor, \u003ci\u003ePoetry Project Newsletter\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Intimate and playful, these vignettes grant readers and friends proximity to Killian beyond the ether and the interface of Amazon.com. Their publication in this collection, an affectionate gesture made in lieu of the usual\u003ci\u003e Collected Stories\u003c\/i\u003e or \u003ci\u003eCollected Poems\u003c\/i\u003e that tend to follow a literary figure’s departure from this world, is terribly romantic, tuned to Killian’s specific genius: endearing at its bitchiest, acerbic at its most sweet.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Lauren Stroh, \u003ci\u003eThe Nation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"When I think of Kevin’s Amazon reviews the enormity truly is how big his project was, how small Amazon, how disposable his literary friend ads were designed to be and yet by turning them out fast as light he occupied Goliath and undid him. Kevin loved culture and was its constant undoing.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Eileen Myles\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"[Kevin Killian’s Amazon reviews] epitomize his genre-bending work: memoir, fiction, poetry, and love letters to the vital forces of literature, consumerism, celebrities, and pragmatism in swooping sentences in which belles lettres nestle into gossip. They are affective and ironic deposits made almost anonymously in the world, like poems left on bus seats.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Matias Viegener\u003c\/b\u003eKevin Killian (1952–2019) was a San Francisco–based poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, critic, and artist. Highly prolific and radically queer, he published several volumes of poetry and short stories, as well as four novels. He also wrote and produced fifty plays, and with his wife, Dodie Bellamy, coedited \u003ci\u003eWriters Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977–1997\u003c\/i\u003e. In addition to reviewing for Amazon, Killian published criticism in \u003ci\u003eArt in America\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eArtforum\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eArtweek\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eBrooklyn Rail\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBOMB\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eFramework\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. Poet D. A. Powell has called Killian “a dark master of the word … an inviting bridegroom and a voyeur who’ll let us play in his fictions until we’re spent.”","brand":"Semiotext(e)","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304506904805,"sku":"NP9781635902181","price":32.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781635902181.jpg?v=1767736314","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/selected-amazon-reviews-isbn-9781635902181","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}