His reviews, usually five stars, are often exaggeratedly gushing, even melodramatic, but they are not mere parodies .... Genuinely illuminating ... Elaborate, protracted critiques ... An oblique yet insightful commentary about modern life ... Killian’s reviews are brimming with genuine pleasure, and also a wonderment and ardor for the great variety of stuff on the Web site ... Killian’s voice [is] palpably alive and joyfully haunting Amazon’s servers.
His writing feels like a carnival because all are invited, a quality that shines in a new posthumous collection ... His opus comprises an unmatched, bravura feat of 21st century criticism. We expect these reviews to be funny, but so often they hold out the possibility of comedy only to shake free our emotions ... Killian’s gymnastic voice can twist into lust, satire or disarming generosity. The irony of writing from within the bowels of the über-corporation is that there is no expectation for consistency, no company line specific enough to constrain a writer’s imagination, and no audience sensibility to acknowledge ... These queer, brief pieces are the delicious fruits of a career spent wading through America’s gleaming cultural waste and finding other beating hearts and curious minds among the wreckage.
Like a punk collective taking over an abandoned building to stage performance art, Killian surreptitiously commandeered a space built by a commercial entity for the purpose of luring the public to willingly perform free labor ... Learned, often laugh-out-loud funny, frequently moving, guilelessly enthusiastic and intellectually generous ... He subverted the essentially cynical egotism of capitalism and reasserted art as, always and ever, communal ... In mapping its own marvelously peculiar terrain, Killian’s work is proof just how deeply fearlessness matters. I’m giving Selected Amazon Reviews five stars. It’s the most they let you give.
Killian’s reviews can be read as meditations on the objects and media that populated our lives for the first twenty-five years of the twenty-first century. He imbued ordinary items—duct tape, a toaster, a DVD—with personal meaning ... His writing is filled with the authorial specificity that the typical Amazon review lacks ... His knowledge of literature and film was encyclopedic and revelatory ... Killian was a humanist of a sort, re-centering the individual experience on a site premised on selling to the collective.
The straightforward title of Kevin Killian’s Selected Amazon Reviews belies the remarkable scope of this text ... Killian’s posts may have begun as a low-stakes effort to get words on the page, but they quickly evolved, and soon his tone and approach became as varied as the products he considered ... Reflect[s] the immediacy and authenticity that are hallmarks of the New Narrative movement ... Killian creatively exploited Amazon’s need for user-generated content ... A compendium of illuminating works of criticism that showcase Killian’s prodigious knowledge and omnivorous appetite for literature, film, and pop music ... Wonderfully weird, and it’s as difficult to pin down as it is to put down ... A marvel of a book, a sensation of wild serendipity, and a virtual opus. Anyone who gets a copy is certain to find something to love in its pages.
An engaging, eccentric reviewerly persona and an enthusiast or even activist remit on behalf of innovative fiction and (especially) poetry ... When reviewing more obvious or mainstream writers, Killian can sound oddly conventional, even banal ... Full of such small moments of ambiguity and more or less comic unreliability ... Quite brilliantly, there are Killian’s reviews of sundry consumer products, unrelated to art or culture ... Its pleasures as well as Killian’s acuteness seem rescued from the wreckage, like lewd graffiti on the walls at Pompeii and Herculaneum ... Smart, scurrilous, humane.
He luxuriates within the endlessly proliferating aisles of ‘the everything store’ and its cacophony of amateur critical voices ... When writing about literature, the register can be that of an exemplary reader with an expansive knowledge of his craft ... The polyvocal ‘I’ of Selected Amazon Reviews appropriates, in turn, the multitudinous fantasies of selfhood that are reified in and reflected out of consumer products and cultural objects.
