“I like to think that if I’d read Kamikaze Lust when it was first released, I’d have sorted myself out sooner. It’s the kind of novel that opens you up, shakes you by the collar, and tells you to wake up.”​
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— from the preface by Carley Moore
Kamikaze Lust
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Kamikaze Lust takes the reader on an electrifying ride through the spectacle
of life and death in millennial America.
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, so to speak, 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.
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Kamikaze Lust takes the reader 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.
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Included in the 25th anniversary edition is a preface by Carley Moore, acclaimed author of Panpocalyse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills and The Stalker Chronicles.
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Praise for KAMIKAZE LUST
“Lauren Sanders’s debut novel illuminates the messiest aspects of sex and death with a fearless honesty that her main character . . . would respect. Thirty-one-year-old Rachel Silver’s sassy wit, her vulnerability, and above all her willingness to risk body and soul in the quest for self-discovery—or self-destruction—take the reader on a wild ride.”
—Ms.
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“Sanders’ spitfire prose and heady, irreverent eroticism throw banality and political correctness to the curb, making Kamikaze Lust the first dynamic lesbian novel of the twenty-first century.”
—New York Blade News
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“In Sanders’s hands, what is usually cliché or gratuitous is hot.”
—Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls
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“Like an official conducting an all-out strip search, first-time novelist Lauren Sanders plucks and probes her characters’ minds and bodies to reveal their hidden lusts, and when all is said and done, nary a body cavity is spared.”
—Time Out New York
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“This sexy little novel isn’t afraid to be steamy—but it isn’t too jaded for romance either.”
—The Advocate​
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“Without wit or heart, this much sex would be unsexy, particularly if the author were using the titillation factor as mere bait for jacket blurbs. Instead, it serves a broader purpose, illustrating that the boundaries we use to demarcate civilized society are largely an illusion, and that labels like ‘porn star,’ ‘cancer patient,’ and ‘lesbian’ are meant to signify—falsely—’people nothing like us.’ Here sex bleeds so naturally into life, and life into sex, that books that shy from this human realm begin to seem prissy and suspect.”
—City Pages (Minneapolis/St. Paul)
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“Sanders zips and zooms through Rachel’s overturned life with prose as sharp, quick, and deadly as any suicide mission.”
—Out Magazine
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“The fact that Sanders can so overtly take on sex and death, write almost exclusively of their relationship to each other and their effects on a developing personality, and not sound clichéd, is a monumental achievement in itself.”
—Toronto Star
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“Kamikaze Lust is a whirl of New York neurotic fast-quipping with a line or two courtesy of Miss Sandra Bernhardt, but who better to borrow from than the Princess of Pith?”
—Time Out London​