E! Entertainment

I think it’s really cool that you write books about pop culture. I read your chapters on Lindsay Lohan & Anna Nicole Smith—love them both. —Josie Stevens, star of the E! reality TV show Married to Rock

There is no one sporting hypermediaflesh like Kate Durbin’s. With E! Entertainment she strips the TV image from its old curves, reupholstering 2D-packed pixelshit into clipped components, sentences, where somehow less surrounded they take on the shape of psychically deformed wallpaper. These are our icon baths hobbling toward you, reciting script-prayer in mime of sleep, and now Durbin is their lord. —Blake Butler, author of the novel Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

Kate Durbin is the brilliant combination of Warhol and Warhollian superstar—both pop satirist and performance artist. Courtroom defiant La Lohan, the clownish pathos of Anna Nicole Smith: these are Durbin’s Jackie O’s and car crashes. Her new conceptual poetry book, E! Entertainment, is both rapturous and ravaging of pop culture, sending up the paparazzi’s glare, the vampiric obsession with the lives of reality starlets, endlessly reported on E! news by fakebaked anchors with colgate smiles. Particularly poignant in this collection is Durbin’s opening piece on MTV’s The Hills, in which she narrates in microdetail the tedium and tragedy of reality TV, its scripted mumblecore, the punctures and weird rhythms, the edited, dramatic pauses, how nothing is said but there’s something bubbling underneath. All this Durbin builds to the (soap) operatic, into a backstabbing tragedy (later she counterpoises the toxic girls on The Hills with another televised catfight, in her piece on Dynasty). With Durbin’s meticulous slowdown we begin to read in between the lines, a meditation on these girls, their lives. —Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl