In 1981-82, my third year as a graduate student in English at Stony Brook University on Long Island, I shared a house in the neighboring town of East Setauket with two of my fellow students in the English department. While living there, I became acquainted with a friend of theirs. Kevin Killian was a year or two ahead of me in the graduate program, and four years older than I was; I never really got to know him well and never saw or communicated with him again after our time together at Stony Brook. Leaving with an M.A., he moved to San Francisco and stayed there the rest of his life, becoming, in the fullness of time, part of a circle of avant-garde West Coast writers that — small world — included a couple of friends of mine. But back to graduate school: one fine morning, to my astonishment, he showed up at the East Setauket house with a painting he’d done. It was a gift. For me. I knew he wrote, but I didn’t know he painted (and I couldn’t fathom why he’d decided to give me one of his creations). Now, thanks to a new book, I’ve discovered that he not only wrote and painted but also had an intense interest in a wide variety of artistic genres — an interest that, over the course of his life (he died of cancer in 2019) developed into real expertise.

That book, edited by Hedi El Kholti and Robert Dewhurst (and equipped with a reliably pretentious introduction by the supremely effete poet and critic Wayne Koestenbaum), is entitled, and I kid you not, Selected Amazon Reviews. You see, it turns out that Kevin was, of all things, an extraordinarily prolific writer of Amazon reviews. (This book, whose contents were written between 2004 and 2019, clocks in at just under 700 pages, and was cut down after his death from an original word count of over one million.) Kevin was also, as his presentation to me of that painting demonstrated — what ever happened to it, I wonder? — a generous soul. Nine-tenths of the reviews in this book, most of them no more than a page long, are fu...