Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 [Paperback]

Luc Sante (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 18, 2007

Whatever the topic and mood, these essays are a pleasure . . . deserves the broadest possible readership. Kirkus Reviews In his books (Low Life, The Factory of Facts) and in a string of wide-ranging and inventive essays, Luc Sante has shown himself to be not only one of our pre-eminent stylists, but also a critic of uncommon power and range. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of his articles many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice and offers ample justification for this high praise. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and the critical tour de force, The Invention of the Blues, Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe, demonstrating the gifts that have made him one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience (Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker).

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

New York City is fated always to remain my home, writes Sante, who became permanently linked with the city through the underground history he recounted in Low Life, and the lead-off essay in this collection revisits the frame of mind he was in when he conceived that book in the Lower East Side of the early 1980s. The best essays that follow maintain that strong personal connection, such as an eyewitness account of a riot in Tompkins Square Park or the time he lived in the same apartment building as Allen Ginsberg (who suffered me, if not especially gladly). The book and music reviews that make up the bulk of the remaining material are usually insightful and occasionally contain striking imagery: he describes, for example, how the punk-country band the Mekons built an imaginary America out of pocket lint. But collecting disparate pieces in a single volume is a risky proposition, and sometimes an awkward skip, as in a chapter on two books by photographer Michael Lesy, temporarily exposes the anthology's patchwork nature. It's worth working through those rough patches, however, to soak up Sante's various observations on the long legacy of outsider culture, from Rimbaud through Buddy Bolden to Bob Dylan. (Aug. 20)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Creative social critic Sante has electrifying things to say about intriguing subjects, ranging from New Year's to Walker Evans, but it is his feint-and-jab prose that makes him noteworthy. At once tough in his thinking, empathic in his analysis, and liberated in expression, Sante selects barbed details, tunes in to danger and suspense, and dispenses wry humor and sure insight. In a memoirist mode, he chronicles a precollege stint in a small and brutal plastic factory in New Jersey, and writes evocatively about living in New York during its decline in the 1970s and 1980s and under Giuliani. His passion for music inspires a fresh look at the blues, a sharp assessment of Bob Dylan, and a caustic takedown of the Woodstock myth. Revisiting Victor Hugo and Rene Magritte yields unexpected results, as does an inquiry into the many meanings of dope. And then there's his tribute to the lost pleasures of cigarettes, in which he concludes, "We may all have stopped smoking, but we continue to burn." Sante is certainly on fire. Seaman, Donna

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Yeti / Verse Chorus Press; 1st edition (September 18, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1891241532
• ISBN-13: 978-1891241536
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #258,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A collection of very good but disparate pieces, November 30, 2007

By 

R. M. Peterson (Santa Fe, NM) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 (Paperback)

KILL ALL YOUR DARLINGS is a collection of Luc Sante pieces originally published, although many in somewhat different form, in journals or newspapers (such as The New York Review of Books or The Village Voice) between 1990 and 2005. (If you are wondering about the title, Sante provides no explanation or clues other than noting that "Kill all your darlings" was "writerly advice attributed to William Faulkner.") The individual pieces, 25 in all, deal with New York City and its environs or with significant (and, in several cases, not-so-significant) figures or events in American music, literature and belles-lettres, the visual arts, or pop culture broadly construed.

Inasmuch as I had read and valued highly two of Sante's previous books ("Low Life" and "The Factory of Facts"), I bought this book with high expectations simply because it was by Luc Sante. But reading 25 disparate pieces, with no real unifying threads or themes, was not quite as smooth sailing as I had anticipated. I could only read two or three at a time, over several weeks. And, unfortunately, the least interesting pieces (at least to me) were the ones on New York City at the beginning of the book. But the intrinsic interest picked up after the first 110 pages, with the high points, to my mind, being the pieces on Bob Dylan, Buddy Bolden, the origin/invention of the blues, Hegre and the Tintin books, Walker Evans, two of Michael Lesy's books of American photographs, and Robert Mapplethorpe.

Sante is a keen observer and often insightful commentator regarding popular and "middlebrow" culture as well as the underbelly and detritus of American life. He writes well and with a distinctive voice. (An example: "All kinds of thoroughly debunked specimens -- the noble cowboy, the contented housewife, the edenic small-town past -- continue to stagger along in the collective imagination because of their proven effectiveness as topical analgesics for reality-based headaches.") This collection illustrates that almost any of his pieces are worth reading, although it will be the rare reader indeed who truly is interested in everything that Sante writes about. All the same, these pieces probably are best read as they were published -- one at a time.

Finally, kudos to the publisher for a sturdy yet reader-friendly binding and a very readable lay-out.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Garden of Delights, February 19, 2008

By 

Ben Sonnenberg (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. Literally. That is, it is full of wonders. At his not infrequent best -- in his essays on jazz and the blues -- Luc Sante reminds this reader of Edmund Wilson. Like Wilson, Sante is dogged and forensic. Without showing off, he tells you things you didn't know and puts you gratefully in his debt. And at his most casual (for instance, his piece on Rudolph Giuliani), Luc Sante is a joy to read.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful collection - Sante's style is irresistible., February 18, 2011

By 

David M. Giltinan (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces, 1990-2005 (Paperback)

"Kill all your Darlings" is a collection of essays by Luc Sante, a writer with a breathtaking command of the English language. This may have something to do with his learning English as a second language as a child (he was born in Liege, Belgium in 1954 and his family moved to the U.S. in the early 1960s) -- one thinks of Nabokov, another writer for whom English was not the first language, but who achieved a mastery of the language superior to that of most native speakers. At any rate, Sante writes so fluidly, with such grace (but without showing off), that the reader is happy to buy whatever story he's spinning.

The essays in this collection include pieces on art, photography, poetry and music, and some more idiosyncratic meditations -- on cigarettes, on factory work, on 'hipness', on the harm done to New York City by Rudy Giuliani, on the particular madness that characterizes New Year celebrations. Sante's Belgian origins are reflected in essays about Magritte and Tintin, respectively. Other pieces deal with Victor Hugo, the photography of Walker Evans and of Robert Mapplethorpe. There is a moving tribute to Allen Ginsberg, who lived in the same NY apartment building as Sante for over ten years.

Though I had no great prior interest in the musical evolution of Bob Dylan or the origin of the blues, Sante's writing is so seductive that I read both pieces, and was riveted throughout. He's just that good. This is an awe-inspiring collection.

My favorite essay was hands-down the one about cigarettes. Though Tintin was pretty fun as well.