Kissssss: A Miscellany

by Steve Katz

This collection—derived from many impulses but unified through one distinctive sensibility—contains passionate subversive acts of language, oblique takes on American life, outbursts of comic genius, long meditations on the cruelty of contemporary customs, and funny, disturbing glimpses of daily life. Reality is rendered pitilessly real, and fantasy bares its teeth.

 

At once playful and devastatingly serious, the works in this collection employ a variety of forms—genres, anti-genres, fantasies, games—while highlighting the dangers and delights of contemporary Hollywood, tsunamis, war, the art world, AIDS, ambition, weapons of mass destruction, family values, perverse sexualities, urban violence, small change and big bucks, are all used to chum the waters of imagination and truth.

Genres: Short Stories

312 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2007

About the author

Steve Katz (May 14, 1935 – August 4, 2019) was an American writer. He is considered an early post-modern or avant-garde writer for works such as The Exagggerations of Peter Prince (1968), and Saw (1972).

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Steve Katz shreds pop culture clichés and he chops mass culture stereotypes and with this minced trash he stuffs his stories like some stuffed fish recipe, inviting us to his gloriously bizarre repast.
The tales grade from absurdist comedy…

She turned off the electric lights, lit a candle and a joss stick, and lowered her butt to the cushion, and sat still to gather herself for a moment before she slipped Harvey Keitel's nose over her clitoris. It fit like a cap, and that made her grin. This felt like some mischief, and she liked that.

To absurdist horror…

This was even sicker, than the postpartum dream some women have where they eat their babies back into their wombs. It was sick.

With all the shades of absurdity in between.

I was happy to discover the nature of money. It's not currency. Art is currency, and some of the artists use it to pay the bills. Money, on the other hand, is a virus, variable in its effects, that spreads through the cables, telephone, optical, and now, sometimes, wireless.

The dish is delicious.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Steve Katz surprised me. He surprised me by not being the tedious surrealist I had pegged him as via the excerpts from Creamy & Delicious (slated by Michael Silverblatt in a DFW interview), but instead a remarkable storyteller with an amazing range who at times lapses into baffling (but never boring) surrealism. The opening stories ‘Current Events,’ ‘Information Highway,’ and ‘Nelly Helps Joe’ find Katz taking on the technoverse with the same quick wit and ear for a satisfyingly weird phrase as Lord George of Saunders (featuring at one point the pleasing visual of a dismembered head slicked in vaginal mucus rolling into the kitty litter), and engaging with the theme of desensitisation in a non-old-fogeyish manner. ‘Hollywood Novelette’ is the longest story, a very bizarre satire(?) featuring a cast of characters with the anagrammed names of movie stars, and a plot where Keanu (Eukan) Reeves has to flee his parents who plan to devour him in a ritual known as Pünkscheit. Among the more notable are ‘Three Conflations Extemporised,’ which shows a diverse range of voices and styles and a knack for multiple layers of discourse through surreal satire, ‘Parrots in Captivity,’ a politically charged story with a powerful climax, and ‘Nowadays & Hereafter,’ which is painful and the most moving piece here, showing Katz has a profound insight into human suffering and a genuine empathy unblocked by satirical smokescreens. Less interesting are the poem ‘Derivation of the Kiss’ and some throwaway short ones like ‘Date Biting,’ but on the whole this miscellany is a fabulous introduction to a unique comedic voice.

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't think I'd like this book. I thought, OK, another embarrassing late-career book by a 1970s metafictionist, and I sat back and waited for the misogyny to start flying. But Katz shows that he's not rested on his former accomplishments but kept pushing the form(s) ahead, and in this collection of pieces composed with various techniques -- including everything from a novella with character names composed of anagrams of Hollywood stars to a poem-story in rhyming couplets to the hauntingly symbolic pacifist ghost story that ends it -- one's expectations are always overturned. Katz also shows himself to be unexpectedly comprehending, human, and wise -- things that experimental writers are not supposed to be. I will be reviewing this for a future issue of American Book Review, but since I just joined goodreads, I thought I'd lead off with this.