“doing a Sontag but without the severity”
November 30, 2024 3:52 AM   Subscribe

A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer is an essay [archive link] by Oscar Schwartz about Kevin Killian, poet, fiction writer, and incredibly prolific Amazon reviewer. A selection of his reviews has been published as a book. Amazon has an extensive sample. His Amazon user profile has only a small selection of reviews, but here’s a handful if you want to see what the fuss is about: MacKenzies Smelling Salts, Devotion (Why I Write) by Patti Smith, and Advil. If you want to read more of his two thousand plus reviews, you can go digging with the Wayback Machine or buy the book.
posted by Kattullus (7 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you for this. I had thought of doing something about Killian and the book on Metafilter but perhaps due to the esteem I hold him in, I struggled to find the words and eventually gave up. As an aspiring young writer (many years ago) Killian, Dodie Bellamy and their demimonde made everything seem possible - and in many ways, they still do.
posted by spibeldrokkit at 5:43 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


Thanks for posting this, I hadn't heard of Killian or this work and it all sounds fascinating (the man, the words, the whole bit).
posted by chavenet at 5:56 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


Here's an alternative archive link; for me the Wayback Machine still threw up a paywall.
posted by chavenet at 5:58 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


Sixty people found the smelling salts review helpful; Patti Smith’s book, only one.
posted by clew at 8:32 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


never heard of him before either (and I don't shop on Amazon much) but he is a treasure indeed and the reviews are very entertaining.
posted by supermedusa at 9:26 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


Kudos to him. I was in the Amazon Vine program for a year and grew to hate reviewing. I pulled myself out of the program — giving up thousands of dollars worth of free stuff — at the thought of doing even one more of them.
posted by dobbs at 10:09 AM on November 30 [2 favorites]


Can they be considered literature?
"It might be more simple for us to disinterest ourselves in material demands in order to produce “pure literature” with a serene conscience, but we would thereby be giving up the idea of choosing our readers outside of the oppressing class. Thus, opposition must also be overcome for ourselves and within ourselves. Let us first persuade ourselves that it can be overcome: literature in itself proves this, since it is the work of a total freedom addressing plenary freedoms and thus in its own way, manifests the totality of the human condition as a free product of a creative activity."
what is literature? [archive.org]
posted by HearHere at 11:45 AM on November 30 [1 favorite]


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