The Wild Creatures

The Wild Creatures brings together all the stories of Sam D'Allesandro, a young voice whose life was tragically snuffed out at age 31 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1988. This new collection includes all of D'Allesandro's published stories (including those first collected in the out-of-print cult classic The Zombie Pit) as well as unpublished stories found among D'Allesandro's papers years after his death by his editor, the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, who worked with the literary estate to create this extended edition of his writing. The Wild Creatures explores a strange terrain of urban legend, the power of sexual obsession, and the thin line where the too-cool becomes the too-hot. Sam D'Allesandro's focused, vivid writing is the stuff of legend: writing so powerful it drags the reader in by the neck.

Sam D'Allesandro, born Richard Anderson in 1956, studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He was handsome and charismatic, the man who'd turn your head at a hundred yards. He began as a poet and published a book of elegant lyrics called Slippery Sins. Soon he fell in with the so-called New Narrative writers Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others, and his writing took a sharp turn toward an extreme purity and poise. He reached out to other like-minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy, with whom he began an epistolary collaboration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro. At the peak of his powers, he began to feel ill. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a brilliant body of work that ranges from stories of one paragraph only to fully developed novellas. Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a book of poetry, Argento Series, two novels, Shy and Arctic Summer, a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows, and two books of stories, Little Men and I Cry Like a Baby. For the San Francisco Poets Theater, Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (with Barbara Guest). His next book will be all about Kylie Minogue.