"In 'Selected Amazon Reviews,' Killian adds yet another Kevin to the list. This Kevin spends his evenings with his wife curled up on the couch..."

"... with their two cats, Ted and Sylvia, watching Katharine Hepburn movies, or knitting, decorating cakes, and hanging pet-themed ornaments on the Christmas trees, as in his five-star 2007 review of Pet Pawprint Hanging DIY Keepsake Ornament. But Kevin Killian in the review section was not the real Kevin Killian, at least not exactly. Did Killian have children, as he claimed in several reviews? No. Did he enjoy fine foods? No. (According to friends, he lived on a diet of only microwave meals and Tab.)... Did that twelve-color set of ballpoint pens really trigger a memory of attending school as an American boy in rural France, where his classmates had 'beautiful pens that were almost family heirlooms?'..."

Writes Oscar Schwartz, in "A Portrait of the Artist as an Amazon Reviewer/Between 2003 and 2019, Kevin Killian published almost twenty-four hundred reviews on the site. Can they be considered literature?"

That's in The New Yorker, where they are not too careful about whether to put a question mark inside a quotation mark, and the answer to the question is no.

Killian was writing Amazon reviews as a sort of art project. Here's an Amazon Associates link to a book that collects his reviews — "Selected Amazon Reviews."

But back to the New Yorker article:

In the mid-two-thousands, when Killian was at his most prolific as a reviewer, it was becoming clear that Amazon was contributing to the destruction of the type of creative life that he enjoyed. Was this his way of queering e-commerce, subverting the platform from within? Wayne Koestenbaum argues, in his foreword to the collection, that Killian’s reviews “Occupy Amazon” with “a radical-faerie insouciance. . . . He enacts a cosmophagic critical practice, doing a Sontag but without the severity.”...

I bet you weren't expecting "queering e-commerce," "radical-faerie insouciance," and "cosmophagic critical practice"! I know I wasn't.

Anyway, the fun times at Amazon are gone now:

Since [the mid-two-thousands], Amazon’s review section has changed dramatically. Each product page now features an A.I.-generated summary of the existing customer reviews, smoothing out the heterogeneity of human taste into an algorithmic average....

[Killian] knew that the form he had chosen to work in was an ephemeral one, and that the company on whose Web site he had left so much of himself would not hesitate to wipe “content” that did not contribute to its bottom line. “Selected Amazon Reviews” is insurance against the erasure that Killian courted....