Sam D'Allesandro

Kevin Killian reads "Nothing Ever Just Disappears" from The Wild Creatures, a collection of stories by Sam D'Allesandro, which he edited. (Running Time: 16:28)

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Sam D'Allesandro, born Richard Anderson in 1956, studied at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and came to San Francisco as a youth in the early 1980s. He was handsome and charismatic, the man who'd turn your head at a hundred yards. He began as a poet and published a book of elegant lyrics called Slippery Sins. Soon he fell in with the so-called "New Narrative" writers Robert Glück, Bruce Boone, Steve Abbott and others, and his writing took a sharp turn toward an extreme purity and poise. He reached out to other like-minded writers and contacted Dennis Cooper, Kathy Acker, Benjamin Weissman, David Trinidad, and Dodie Bellamy, with whom he began an epistolary collaboration she was later to publish as Real: The Letters of Mina Harker and Sam D'Allesandro. At the peak of his powers, he began to feel ill. He died of AIDS in 1988, leaving behind a brilliant body of work that ranges from stories of one paragraph only to fully developed novellas.