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February 3, 2025 – Feature
Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews
Ben Eastham

What is “literature,” and how is it distinguished from criticism, gossip, promotional material? Is it contaminated or invigorated by its overlap with these other forms of writing? Might literature be both creative and commercial, and, for that matter, throwaway and timeless, autobiography and fiction, local and universal, critical and compassionate, tongue-in-cheek and life-or-death? Are words on the walls of toilet stalls, on social media, on online marketplaces as worthy of the honorific as the products of the literary publishing industry? This selection of Kevin Killian’s nearly 2,400 product reviews for Amazon does not answer these questions so much as undermine the basic assumption on which they are founded: why are we so eager to ascribe value to writing according to its category, rather than attending to the writing itself?
We learn from an afterword by Dodie Bellamy, to whom Killian was married for over thirty years, that her fellow member of San Francisco’s New Narrative movement started leaving reviews on Amazon in the wake of a heart attack in 2003. A practice intended to ease his way back into writing soon became more than a means to an end, to judge by the frequency of his contributions (sometimes multiple times …
July 1, 2022 – Feature
Natasha Soobramanien & Luke Williams’s Diego Garcia
Orit Gat

The narrator of Diego Garcia, a novel written collaboratively by Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, is sometimes a he, sometimes a she, always a we. When its two speakers, Oliver and Damaris, are not together, the narrative can fracture into separate columns. They live in Edinburgh. It’s 2014. “We” walk to the library; “he” makes coffee in the morning; “she” loves the cardamom buns at the Swedish café. The city is a backdrop to their conversations about Theodor Adorno and James Baldwin, the Velvet Underground, writing, and money; they discuss their debts in numbers, their credit scores in terms of unavailable futures. On the streets are posters for the Scottish Independence referendum.
Their life feels detached until one day they meet Diego. Diego is Chagossian, from the community exiled to Mauritius and the Seychelles by the British government between 1967 and 1973 so that the island of Diego Garcia could be turned into a US military base. Diego—the name he adopted in acknowledgement of his lost homeland—meets them one night for a drink. They never see Diego again, but before he leaves he tells Damaris his life story: how he grew up in Mauritius and ended up undocumented in the …