25th Anniversary Edition of award-winning novel Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders, available now as audiobook by acclaimed narrator Helen Laser
Hello again, dear audiobook friends! Today’s spotlight article is dedicated to Lauren Sanders’s Kamikaze Lust, a queer cult-classic debut and a winner of a 2000 Lambda Literary Award. This new audiobook edition is performed by acclaimed narrator of literary fiction Helen Laser and contains a new foreword by Carley Moore.
To be honest, I’m not one who is thrilled by this genre, but I will take this as a personal challenge to review this audiobook, especially since I know the narrator is exceptional and that the novel has been well received and even got a 25th Anniversary Edition.
Kamikaze Lust is available at audible, apple, spotify, audiobooks.com, or wherever you get your audiobooks.
Let’s take a quick look at the Publisher’s Summary and after that I will tell you more about the author and the narrator.
Kamikaze Lust takes the listener on an electrifying ride through the spectacle of life and death in millennial America. Smart, hardboiled, and humorous, the novel taps the American obsession with sex and death, sex and popular culture, sex and the written word, sex and pornography, sex and green M&Ms, and, of course, the perennial sex and love. Sanders voices a feminism buried in desire that nevertheless insists on sprouting and blossoming.
When her newspaper goes on strike, journalist Rachel Slivowitz is precipitously launched—into a new job as a porn star’s biographer, a new relationship with her coworker and pal Shade, and a bold new attitude—all at once. The story Rachel had been working on about a practitioner of physician-assisted suicide—a scoop the strike deprives her of—becomes personal when her Aunt Lorraine, dying of cancer, begs to meet the doctor Rachel has been interviewing. Meanwhile, as her biographical subject intuits Rachel’s migrating sexual orientation, and her dysfunctional and often racist family quiz her about her new gig, she is wracked with Shade-fueled fantasies and anxiety over Aunt Lorraine’s impending death—and suddenly thrust into the periphery of the sex industry, where Rachel Slivowitz unleashes an erotic alter-ego, Silver Ray, who may be spinning out of control. Sanders has said, “I like to imagine individuals, women mostly, who are letting their inner bad girl fly free.” In this case, that bad girl may find herself headed for good places.
Included in the 25th-anniversary edition is a foreword by Carley Moore, acclaimed author of Panpocalypse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills, and The Stalker Chronicles, and a clinical professor of writing and creative production at NYU.
Lauren Sanders (she/they) is the author of the novel, Kamikaze Lust, which won a 2000 Lambda Literary Award and has been reissued in a 25th anniversary edition from Akashic Books, with a new foreword by Carly Moore. An audiobook is also available. Lauren’s other novels include With or Without You (a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award) and The Book of Love and Hate, which The Advocate called “a thrilling tale of espionage, family ties, sex, love, and betrayal.”
Helen Laser is an American actor, multiple award-winning narrator, and voiceover artist based in New York City. She began acting professionally at an early age and has received training and education from Muhlenberg College, Ithaca College, and Oxford University. She is the audiobook narrator of Yellowface, published by Harper Audio, which has been selected as part of Audible’s Best 20 Audiobooks of 2023, Apple Audiobooks Must Listen, and is an Earphones award winner. It is also a 2024 Audie Awards Finalist for Fiction.
I will return soon with a full review for Kamikaze Lust, but until then, take care, stay safe, and don’t forget, always listen with your heart!
Victor Dima
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