Selected Amazon Reviews

Included in the Washington Post’s 50 notable works of nonfiction from 2024
Included in the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2024 list


“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.”
—Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Washington Post

“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.)”
—Brian Dillon, 4Columns

“Selected Amazon Reviews 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.”
—Oscar Schwartz, The New Yorker

“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.”
—Daniel Felsenthal, Los Angeles Times

“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.”
—James Shackell, The Story

“It’ll be some time before any contemporary reviewer matches Killian’s achievement here. Selected Amazon Reviews 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.”
—Ian Sansom, The Telegraph

“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.”
—Tausif Noor, Poetry Project Newsletter

“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 Collected Stories or Collected Poems 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.”
—Lauren Stroh, The Nation

Kevin 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 Writers Who Love Too Much- New Narrative 1977-1997. In addition to reviewing, Killian published criticism in Art in America, Artforum, Artweek, the Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Framework, 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.”

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