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.)
In the new stories of Impossible Princess, Killian's only gotten more edgy, imaginative, funny and weirdo, bonko, crazy sexy. It's amazing the way he blends such wild provocations of porn with immersion in pop culture and philosophical musings. He's a pretty unique writer, stimulating a reader from brain to bone.
&$151;John F. Karr
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.
What's the secret of Killian's prodigious talents with prose, poetry, plays, biographies - and, as is the case with most of the tales in this genius collection, literary porn? All is revealed in 'Rochester' (written with Tony Leuzzi), in which a star-struck reader of 'this great man' finally meets 'Kevin Killian' after hot and heavy e-mail correspondence - only to find he's a dirty old man living with a chimpanzee who hammers out stories for him on a battered electric typewriter. 'Spurt,' more grounded in morose reality, is about a jaded commuter's motel trysts with damaged men; erotic fantasy also fuels 'Too Far,' in which a virginal, sexually confused swimming pool salesman, obsessed by Kylie Minogue, meets a has-been British pop star who tickles his libido. Five of the 10 short stories in this exhilarating collection by one of gay lit's luminaries are reprints - but because the books in which they originally appeared are long out of print, and because they're so darned good, this collection is better than new.
—Richard Labonte
Readers familiar with Killian's earlier work, no matter how familiar they believe themselves to be, are entering foreign terrain. It's much darker here in the framing, but just as fantastic. Familiar or not, it's a place worth seeing.
—Jesse Hudson
. . . in [Killian's] pages, characters don't so much stumble into experience as embrace it, tear it apart, and ache for more and different kinds of it. His body of work, which includes (and hybridizes) fiction, poetry, the memoir and the essay, is marked by a playful rigor and an openness that takes nothing at face value. It wields an uncanny ability to be penetrating and generous at once. All these are qualities that have made him — deservedly — a cult figure among discerning readers everywhere.
— Ashé Journal
When it comes to unpretty and unsentimental sex shed of the layers of accumulated euphemism, Killian doles it out in spades whether readers are prepared for it or not.
— San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Kevin Killian is the greatest unsung genius in contemporary American literature."—Dennis Cooper, author of Everyman: Stories and Closer: A Novel
"Kevin Killian's Impossible Princess is impossibly captivating, each short story a bed of sticky pollen. It's an endless inspiration to writers and readers alike."—Susie Bright, editor of Best American Erotica
"Kevin Killian's stellar body of work defies categorization. His novels, stories, and poems have been around for over two decades, occupying sacred spaces on the bookshelves of idolators like me and many others. The pieces in Impossible Princess—some of them written with various splendid collaborators—are hilarious, sad, scary, intimate, weird, complex, really dirty, and most of all, first-rate. Each story's a little outburst of brilliance. I love this book."—Scott Heim, author of Mysterious Skin and We Disappear
"Kevin Killian has long been considered one of the finest, if unheralded, writers of experimental gay fiction."—Amazon.com
