Duke & Jill - Softcover

Kolm, Ron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0996352619 ISBN 13: 9780996352611

Publisher: Unknown Press, 2015

Synopsis

Duke and Jill do drugs. They live on the corner of Avenue A and 10th street, in a mostly burnt-out building. Duke is originally from Wisconsin. Jill is from Wisconsin, too. They don't have much else in common.

About this title

About the Author

Ron Kolm is one of the founding members of the Unbearables literary collective, and an editor of several of their anthologies: Crimes of the Beats, The Worst Book I Ever Read and The Unbearables Big Book of Sex! Ron is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine and the editor of the Evergreen Review. He is the author of The Plastic Factory and the co-author, with Jim Feast, of the novel, Neo Phobe. A collection of his poems, Divine Comedy, was published by Fly By Night Press, and a new one, Suburban Ambush, came out from Autonomedia. He's had work published in Live Mag!, Gathering of the Tribes, the Poetry Super Highway, Urban Graffiti, MungBeing and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron Kolm has worked in many of the signature independent bookstores of New York City over the years: The Strand, St. Mark's Bookshop, Shakespeare & Co, and currently, Posman Books. Kolm's papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they've been catalogued in the Fales Collection as part of the Downtown Writers Group.

From the Back Cover

"Ron Kolm's Duke & Jill stories are classic illustrations of appealingly casual criminal ingenuity at work in a society where everybody has too much of nothing, either materially or spiritually. They remind me of Denis Johnson's doom-flecked narratives as well as my favorite Buster Keaton movies. Even if the time and place of their setting is gone with the wind, their anarchic spirit is still a breath of fresh air."
--Gary Indiana, author of Utopia's Debris: Selected Essays and Last Seen Entering the Biltmore: Plays, Short Fiction, Poems 1975--2010

"Take the bumbling antics of the Keystone Cops, season with a pinch of Bonnie and Clyde, add in some not-so-gentle satire of East Village funk, top with a generous helping of a kind-of-a-love story and you have the comedy of errors that is Ron Kolm's, Duke & Jill. His sometimes street smart, more often street un-smart characters use their wits to survive the changes in their East Village neighborhood--and survive they do, in spite of all the setbacks they get themselves into and out of. Kolm handles his characters and their misadventures with just the right touch, moving from vignette to vignette with an effortless ease that belies the skillful deftness of his writing. It's all there, and extremely well executed indeed."--Susan Sherman, author of Nirvana on Ninth Street and The Light that Puts an End to Dreams.

"You probably knew Duke and Jill at some point. They might have lived down the hall from you back in the day. Maybe you didn't like them, or maybe you did. Maybe they scored for you, or you for them. Poet and literary impresario Ron Kolm represents this classic East Village trouble couple with the deadpan élan of a bohemian raconteur looking back from the other side of nowheresville. Kolm's spare, but evocative scenarios always end in a fated punctuation point that leaves the reader laughing while crying while wondering, perhaps, just why this sad species of ours has gained the earthly prominence it has."
--Carl Watson, author of Hotel of Irrevocable Acts and Backwards the Drowned Go Dreaming.

Edition details

• Publisher: Unknown Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0996352619
• ISBN 13: 9780996352611
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 102