<TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Impossible Princess</TitleText>

City Lights Books onix@onixsuite.com 20130217 eng

GCDS-9780872865280 03 01 City Lights Books 01 GCOI 87286100250090 02 0872865282 03 9780872865280 15 9780872865280 BC <TitleType>01</TitleType> <TitleText>Impossible Princess</TitleText> 1 A01 Killian, Kevin Kevin Killian A founder and former director of Small Press Traffic, Kevin Killian has long been a hidden favorite of gay literary San Francisco. He has written many books, including two previous story collections, the Pen award-winning Little Men (1996) and I Cry Like a Baby 2001), two novels, Shy (1989) and Arctic Summer (1997), and a memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989). His latest book, Action Kylie (2008), is a collection of poems inspired by Kylie Minogue. He co-wrote 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 edits 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). He has also authored several novels, including his latest, Spread Eagle (Alyson Books, 2010). 01 eng 200 20 desire; fiction; gay; short story 01 Winner of the 2010 Lambda Literary Award <a target="blank" href="http://www.lambdaliterary.org/awards/awards-finalists/"></a> for Best Gay Erotica. Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by Kevin Killian. An original member of the notorious San Francisco-based "new narrative" circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy yet edgy tales that explore both the humor and darkness of desire. From an examination of an ex-British-boy-band-member's skeevy skivvies, to a sexual assault inside a copy machine, to a nocturnal tryst in a panther cage, Impossible Princess runs a bizarre gamut of erotic experience, where the appetite of lust is only satisfied by the peculiar unexpected.Killian has published numerous books, including two previous story collections, the Pen award-winning Little Men (1996) and I Cry Like a Baby (2001). His latest novel, Spreadeagle (2010), is published by Alyson Books. "Kevin Killian is the greatest unsung genius in contemporary American literature." -Dennis Cooper, author of Everyman: Stories and Closer: A Novel"Kevin Killian's Impossible Princess is impossibly captivating, each short story a bed of sticky pollen. It's an endless inspiration to writers and readers alike." -Susie Bright, editor of Best American Erotica"Kevin Killian's stellar body of work defies categorization. His novels, stories, and poems have been around for over two decades, occupying sacred spaces on the bookshelves of idolators like me and many others. The pieces in Impossible Princess-some of them written with various splendid collaborators-are hilarious, sad, scary, intimate, weird, complex, really dirty, and most of all, first-rate. Each story's a little outburst of brilliance. I love this book." -Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear 02 Impossible Princess is a book John Rechy's or Dennis Cooper's characters would read 08 ". . . in [Killian's] pages, characters don't so much stumble into experience as embrace it, tear it apart, and ache for more and different kinds of it. His body of work, which includes (and hybridizes) fiction, poetry, the memoir and the essay, is marked by a playful rigor and an openness that takes nothing at face value. It wields an uncanny ability to be penetrating and generous at once. All these are qualities that have made him - deservedly - a cult figure among discerning readers everywhere." -Peter Dubé Ashé Journal 08 "When it comes to unpretty and unsentimental sex shed of the layers of accumulated euphemism, Killian doles it out in spades whether readers are prepared for it or not." - Juliette Tang San Francisco Bay Guardian 08 "'What portion of one's personality is a fiction?' . . . It's a question that swims through [Impossible Princess] . . . It swims through, dives in, submerges itself, reemerges and winsomely skinny-dips in the at times murky, at turns sparkling ponds of Killian's energetic, muscular, sassy, exquisite prose." - Colin Herd Chroma 08 "'When pressed to account for her affinity to gay men, Moira always smiled and said, "I am a gay man, trapped in a woman's body...This is San Francisco!"' At once funny, knowing, sexy, and a tad twisted, Moira (a character in Kevin Killian's story "Greensleeves") reflects the overall tone of Impossible Princess, an eclectic collection of short fiction that sparkles, sizzles, and arouses the intellect."-Jim Gladstone Passport Magazine 08 "Readers familiar with Killian's earlier work, no matter how familiar they believe themselves to be, are entering foreign terrain. It's much darker here in the framing, but just as fantastic. Familiar or not, it's a place worth seeing." - Jesse Hudson Fanzine 08 "What's the secret of Killian's prodigious talents with prose, poetry, plays, biographies - and, as is the case with most of the tales in this genius collection, literary porn? All is revealed in 'Rochester' (written with Tony Leuzzi), in which a star-struck reader of 'this great man' finally meets 'Kevin Killian' after hot and heavy e-mail correspondence - only to find he's a dirty old man living with a chimpanzee who hammers out stories for him on a battered electric typewriter. 'Spurt,' more grounded in morose reality, is about a jaded commuter's motel trysts with damaged men; erotic fantasy also fuels 'Too Far,' in which a virginal, sexually confused swimming pool salesman, obsessed by Kylie Minogue, meets a has-been British pop star who tickles his libido. Five of the 10 short stories in this exhilarating collection by one of gay lit's luminaries are reprints - but because the books in which they originally appeared are long out of print, and because they're so darned good, this collection is better than new." -Richard Labonte Book Marks 08 "Whatever his subject matter, Killian maintains full authority - offering up a homoerotic interpretation of Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find and a brilliant imagined history of Hank Williams. Here, under the author's careful control and easygoing charisma, everything seems up for grabs, and almost anything seems possible." Time Out New York 08 "In the new stories of Impossible Princess, Killian's only gotten more edgy, imaginative, funny and weirdo, bonko, crazy sexy. It's amazing the way he blends such wild provocations of porn with immersion in pop culture and philosophical musings. He's a pretty unique writer, stimulating a reader from brain to bone." -John F. Karr Bay Area Reporter 08 "Ten homoerotic stories by Killian (Spreadeagle) explore startling encounters between the straight and gay worlds. Several of the stories, set in the 1970s, appeared in Killian's previous collections, such as 'Hot Lights,' in which a strapped-for-cash student gets hired for a hardcore porn shoot, and ''Spurt,' set in a Long Island motel where a couple of commuters congregate to indulge in morbid sex. Others are elaborate romances, such as ''Dietmar Lutz Mon Amour,' where an erotic encounter with a security guard in the basement of San Francisco's De Young museum provides a fulfilling intellectual kinship for the married narrator, and ''Too Far,' in which a straight swimming pool salesman from Maryland clearly wants to experiment with a man at a party, though he may get more than he anticipates. Killian is best being self-consciously writerly, as in 'Rochester,' in which a naïve writer arrives at the dilapidated home of the legendary writer 'Kevin Killian,' only to discover a decrepit has-been who keeps a pet chimpanzee typing in the bedroom. Fans of Killian's work will be pleased to find fresh stimulation with shades of Dennis Cooper." Publishers Weekly 23 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100250090/extras/ImpossiblePrincessExcerptCL.pdf 04 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100250090/images/87286100250090L.gif 07 02 72 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100250090/images/87286100250090S.gif 30 07 01 http://www.citylights.com/resources/titles/87286100250090/extras/Kevin_Killian_Interview_Dec_3.MP3 http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100250090 City Lights Publishers 01 City Lights Publishers 20091010 08 16 oz City Lights Books 01 WORLD 20 20091010 01 02 15.95 USD