Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader [Pehme köide]

'Death-that's not the great sadness,' Steve Abbott writes in his unpublished novel Lost Causes, about Spencer who in his dream realizes 'hadn't known until now how much he loved his life... But this sadness also made him horny.' Reading this sentence for the first time, I was amused. Steve could be philosophical, sensuous, angry, humorous, sarcastic, and candid, but never maudlin. Then I realized how long he has been gone-for nearly thirty years. While his Spencer is definitely a creature of sensation-of "eating, drinking, and fucking"; his waking explorations confirming that he was yet alive, Steve was not just a man of memory and of moment. This collection of his work, Beautiful Aliens-poetry, prose, and essays-proves that his voice has not stopped in time or in death." -Gabrielle Daniels "Steve Abbott rarely took anything for granted, in style, technique, or what to say. He granted full credibility to the emotional and conceptual shocks and drift of his human experience. This wide-ranging writing follows the laws of one innate, mercurial nature as it conspired with the cross-purposes and contradictions of this world we share with him. The diversions and fascinations within Steve's life linger here as texts to prompt anyone's reflective, ambivalent self-analysis and engagement."-Steve Benson "Beautiful Aliens is a book of heart, urgency, intellect, and surprise. Yes, surprise! And not only for those unfamiliar with the writing and the work of this literary powerhouse, but also for those of us who have studied the yellowing pages of out of print books bearing his name. How much more there is to Steve Abbott than any of us could have guessed! Drawing on his experiences within and across communities, Steve Abbott wrote journalism, poetry, and narratives with a complex sympathy, sensitive to shifting cultural tides of the late twentieth century. As optimistic as amethyst, as alluring as his signature shades, as iconic and unexpected as the image of the fallen Tower, these writings assembled thoughtfully by Jamie Townsend are ready to bring down the whole brutish world with a single stab of lightening." -Eric Sneathen "Holy Terror is good reading, well written and extremely knowledgeable about the subject of magic black and white. In fact, all magic is both."--William Burroughs "Steve Abbott's Holy Terror is a purgatoria, or rites of scarification, in which innocence can gain be seen to exist most supremely for the glory of its own ritual disembowelment...Abbott is exquisite and the blood he writes with is hisown."--Diamanda Galas "Holy Terror is an unnervingly precise tampering with one of contemporary literature's richest and least utilized subjects, religious devotion. Abbott's characters are telling scavengers in a novel whose borders stretch from the cutting edge of Euro trash depravity to the smokescreen at the heart of Christian myth."--Dennis Cooper