Impossible Princess - Softcover

Killian, Kevin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872865282 ISBN 13: 9780872865280

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2009

Synopsis

“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

Impossible Princess is the third collection of gay short fiction by PEN Award–winning San Francisco–based author Kevin Killian. A member of the “new narrative” circle including Dennis Cooper and Kathy Acker, Killian is a master short story writer, crafting campy and edgy tales that explore the humor and darkness of desire. A former director of Small Press Traffic and a co-editor of Mirage/Periodical, Killian co-wrote Jack Spicer’s biography, Poet Be Like God, and co-edited three Spicer books, including My Vocabulary Did This To Me: Collected Poems. His latest book, Action Kylie, is a collection of poems devoted to Kylie Minogue.

About this title

About the Author:

A founder and former director of Small Press Traffic, Kevin Killian was a hidden favorite of gay literary San Francisco. He was the author of many books including the PEN award-winning Little Men(1996), I Cry Like a Baby (2001), Shy (1989), Arctic Summer (1997), Spread Eagle (2010), Bedrooms Have Windows (1989), and Action Kylie (2008), a collection of poems inspired by Kylie Minogue. He co-wrote the Jack Spicer biography, Poet Be Like God (1998) and co-edited several volumes of Spicer's work, includingMy Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008). With his wife Dodie Bellamy, he edited the long-running poetry zine, Mirage/Periodical. His work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in, among others,Best American Poetry1988 (ed. John Ashbery), and Discontents (ed. Dennis Cooper). Impossible Princesswon the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Erotic Fiction. Kevin Killian died on June 15th, 2019.

From Publishers Weekly:

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. (Nov.)
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About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0872865282
• ISBN 13: 9780872865280
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 164