Culture January 23, 2013

Kevin Killian is one of America’s great eccentrics, a stylist with so much pizazz that perhaps it’s inevitable he has been punished with under-recognition. His sentences are suffused with a folksiness that reminds one of the great southern writers, though his books are usually set in the California he has called home for the past several decades. In his latest novel, Spreadeagle, one of his characters relays the following: “‘Dogs and cats got two things in common,’ my mother used to say, ‘and one of them ain’t fit to mention.’ That always made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t even know