----/ The Squid List /-------------------------------------------------- The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro
Tuesday, November 8 7:30 pm Free ----/ Event Description /----------------------------------------------- Diana Cage, Rob Halpern, and Kevin Killian read from The Wild Creatures: Collected Stories of Sam D'Allesandro. The Wild Creatures brings together all the stories of Sam D'Allesandro, a young voice whose life was tragically snuffed out at age 31 at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1988. This new collection includes all of D'Allesandro's published stories (including those first collected in the out-of-print cult classic The Zombie Pit) as well as unpublished stories found among D'Allesandro's papers years after his death by his editor, the poet and novelist Kevin Killian, who worked with the literary estate to create this extended edition of his writing. The Wild Creatures explores a strange terrain of urban legend, the power of sexual obsession, and the thin line where the too-cool becomes the too-hot. Sam D'Allesandro's focused, vivid writing is the stuff of legend: writing so powerful it drags the reader in by the neck. "Sam D'Allesandro's stories blur the lines between truth and fiction, in the cause of a devotion to writing as strong as anyone's I've ever known. Even before his death he had attained icon status, and now, years later, the work still holds up--its purity and its power still stun, like jewels in a tomb. We all make up our own legends as we go along, but Sam had only to look inside to find the divine." --Dodie Bellamy, author of Pink Steam "The Wild Creatures is enough to give anyone a crush on Sam D'Allesandro. His voice is beguilingly intimate, but never gossipy or confessional--perfect for his spare, focused little stories. He describes relationships with an attention to emotional nuance that makes his characters seem both unique and eerily familiar. His thoughts glimmer with a lucid, unsentimental intelligence and freshness. This is what queer literature looks like freed from pretension and banality." --Alvin Orloff, author of Gutter Boys "For years I've scoured used book stores for copies of Sam D'Allesandro's work, buying up what I could find and passing it on to friends with the injunction: Read this. The Wild Creatures is more than the resuscitation of a brilliant, out-of-print writer. It's that rarest of things: a true literary event." --K.M. Soehnlein, author of You Can Say You Knew Me When "Beautiful, queer, former farmboy Richard Anderson took the name Sam D'Allesandro on arriving on the West Coast--sometimes claiming he was the son of the Warhol film "superstar" Joe Dallesandro--and never looked back. Before he died of AIDS at 31 in 1988, D'Allesandro had been writing poetry and fiction, and had some stories published in literary magazines and anthologies. This compilation from Killian, who knew D'Allesandro, has the unevenness of first fiction, but contains enough gems to stand with any of the short collections published this year. It's pretty hard to beat the opening of "Nothing Ever Just Disappears," the book's first piece: "I didn't know exactly what he meant by 'accessible.'" It ends with one of the most understated, angry depictions of the loss of a lover to AIDS, ever. The best of the other 17 pieces make what is usually inarticulate in casual attraction and sex deadpan articulate; D'Allesandro also writes beautifully of women that his speaker loves, including San Francisco neighbor Judy, who searches for "effortless, perfect rhythm." The same can be said of D'Allesandro, whose refined sentences convey real grace." --Publishers Weekly Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Sam D'Allesandro, born Richard Anderson in 1956, studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He was handsome and charismatic, the man who'd turn your head at a hundred yards. He began as a poet and published a book of elegant lyrics called Slippery Sins. Soon he fell in with the so-called "New Narrative" writers Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others, and his writing took a sharp turn toward an extreme purity and poise. He reached out to other like- minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy, with whom he began an epistolary collabo-ration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro. At the peak of his powers, he began to feel ill. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a brilliant body of work that ranges from stories of one paragraph only to fully developed novellas. Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written a book of poetry, Argento Series, two novels, Shy and Arctic Summer, a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows, and two books of stories, Little Men and I Cry Like a Baby. For the San Francisco Poets Theater, Killian has written thirty plays, including Stone Marmalade (with Leslie Scalapino) and Often (with Barbara Guest). His next book will be all about Kylie Minogue. ----/ Venue Info /------------------------------------------------------ Cody's Stockton Street 2 Stockton Street San Francisco 415-773-0444 http://www.codysbooks.com ----/ Additional Info /------------------------------------------------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] 415-773-0444 http://www.codysbooks.com ----/ The Squid List Admin /--------------------------------------------- The Squid List, a tentacle of Laughing Squid http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/ subscribe, unsubscribe, change your email address or change your subscription options: http://lists.laughingsquid.org/mailman/listinfo/squidlist/ Frequently Asked Questions & Submission Guidelines Squid List FAQ: http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/faq.html The Squid List Online Calendar: http://laughingsquid.org/squidlist/calendar/ The Squid List RSS Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/squidlist ----/ Laughing Squid /-------------------------------------------------- Laughing Squid http://laughingsquid.com underground art and culture from San Francisco and beyond Laughing Squid Web Hosting http://laughingsquid.net friendly, dependable and secure web hosting services for artists, individuals, bloggers, non-profits and small businesses Copyright (c) 2005 Laughing Squid. 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