In E! Entertainment, Kate Durbin zooms into the privileged dramas of MTV's The Hills and Bravo's Real Housewives, the public tragedies of Amanda Knox and Anna Nicole Smith. Durbin traces the migratory patterns of the flightiest members of our televised demimonde, from the vacant bedrooms of the Playboy Mansion to the modern gothic set of Kim Kardashian's fairytale wedding, rendering a fabulous, fallen world in all its hyperreal strangeness.
When E! Entertainment came out in 2014, it was ahead of its time in its re-framing of the mistreated and misunderstood celebutantes of the early aughts. Durbin began working on the book in 2010, pioneering her process of writing through reality TV. She released two chapbooks in 2011 and 2012, as well as many online excerpts.
Over the course of several years, she meticulously transcribed shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
She then crafted the stories that make up the book, and what emerged was her dead-pan, roving camera’s eye voice—the narrator of E! This idiosyncratic voice elevates the details not normally noticed when one watches reality TV: the music, the quick cuts, the montages, the mumblecore, the background objects and side players.
Through this signature voice, which operates as a kind of “ghost orb” (Entropy, Best Poetry Books of 2014) the book’s ontological strangeness emerges.
“[Durbin] calls attention to the types of criticisms regularly lauded at women in the public eye. E! Entertainment reassesses a culture that at once fixates on public images of women―voyeuristically watching their lives for entertainment―while simultaneously mocking, dismissing and condescending to them." - Marisa Crawford, Bitch
“Durbin successfully changes the viewing activity of reality-as-entertainment into an active reading of trauma, or post-trauma.” -Lysette Simmons, Tarpaulin Sky
“E! Entertainment uses transcription to illuminate, like a ghost orb, interactions on reality television. E! includes astonishing dispatches from the Playboy mansion, the Amanda Knox trial, and the memory of Anna Nicole Smith. The book feels so haunted: everything depicted is so remote, but Durbin’s focus is so unshakably intense.” -Entropy, Best Poetry Books of 2014
“Highly original.” -Sandra Simonds, Poetry Foundation
“The pleasure in attention here is like reading the Elizabeth Bishop of the Netflix generation, a similar catalogue mania of objects and animals…offering a relish reminiscent of Mallarmé.” -Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader
“Durbin’s E! is a lens through which to view reality TV that is more critically accurate than the product itself. [After reading it], if you could somehow diagram the Kim Kardashian phenomenon, the results might look something like the cross section of a planet.” -Art in America
“I call Kate Durbin one of the most compelling contemporary American writers because I feel like she’s in her own lane. No one does what she does in the way that she does it.” —Christopher Higgs, HTML Giant
“…a deep meditation on what we see from designer heels to cocktails through image juxtaposition and repetition. Much attention is given to the simple recordings remixed: excerpts that function on a archeological/sociological level.” -Stacey Elaine, Fanzine
“David Foster Wallace’s [work…has] given us a sense of a premillennial set of concerns about television and entertainment with regard to irony, sincerity, and entertainment commodities and forms, but Durbin’s book represents/realizes more precisely the cultural milieu that we find ourselves in. Whereas Wallace sought to get under the skin of television personalities in his early short fiction, Durbin gives us what we see and hear from the programming itself. Rendered in her stripped-down prose, prose that forces us to pause and reabsorb what we have already seen and heard, this may be a much more powerful — and sinister — endeavor."—Thomas Cooke, The Rumpus
"Durbin makes a clear Thoreauvian argument against consumerism while celebrating the women who succeed within this broken system, a thirst for success and savagery that is most commonly thought of as the domain of men. This desire for comfort and entitlement of personhood, belies the very shallowness which their reality costs. Durbin understands this sacrifice and while deconstructing poetic codes gives each [real housewife] a veranda of her own, a Malibu view." - Nikki Darling, The Art Book Review
“Since it’s clear that ours is a Golden Age of TV it makes perfect sense that it might be a perfect moment for some Golden Age-type writing on reality television. Boom! That’s what you get in Durbin’s yummy delve into housewives, sexy sirens, lonesome doomed doves, and other boys and girls behaving badly but always with a sense of power."-Jerry Saltz, senior art critic, New York Magazine
“There is something slyly ingenious about this book from Kate Durbin. It is one of the most sophisticated renderings of the constantly fluctuating neutral state between cinematic documentation and unreality that I’ve ever encountered in a book. Durbin, like Nathaniel West, seems to have translated American fantasy life into an enthralling, neutral dream state. — Jonathon Sturgeon, Books You Might Have Missed in 2014, Flavorwire
“Kate Durbin is pop culture’s stenographer. E! Entertainment ingeniously peers inside the television static, revealing the many fictions that make up our reality, and the many realities which make up our fictions. It’s also a lot of fun to read. I love it.”-Heidi Montag, star of MTV’s reality show The Hills
"Seemingly unending descriptions of jewelry, straightforward inventories of rooms in the Playboy Mansion, cinematic cutaways—it’s all a weirdly engaging and smart addition to Durbin’s ongoing practice."—Publisher's Weekly
“A genius book.” —Enclave
"Chilling."—Rachel Rabbit White, VICE
"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 E! reality TV show Married to Rock
"Even more surreal than what we get on TV, and also subversively funny." -XO Jane
"Thoroughly Hollywood and completely feminist...a complex commentary on the objectifying Hefner franchise." - Amanda Montei, Ms. Magazine
"Durbin elevates petty O.C. arguments between Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag to the status of serious literature." -Nylon
"Probably a work of genius." -Flavorwire
E! Entertainment is available from Wonder Press
Highly original.
-Poetry Foundation
Thoroughly Hollywood and completely feminist.
-Amanda Montei, Ms. Magazine
Selected Press
Interview in The Los Angeles Review of Books
Interview in Marina Abromovic Institute
Slate - The Funniest Books by the Funniest Living Writers
Kim’s Fairytale Wedding (audio)
"Durbin looks past the snobbish dismissal of reality tv to study Kim Kardashian's nuptials and Anna Nicole's trials and, secretly, all of our tribulations. Durbin's anti-satire demands to be read and read again, lest the paparazzi flashes blind you from seeing your own reflection." - Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Adult Magazine
"In E! Entertainment, Kate Durbin lets us linger over the lustrous details of the most authentically constructed works of our time, in all their inauthentic constructions. Here, we can plainly see "a microphone pack is viewable in the back of her dress"; "the back of her tank top pops out where her microphone pack is"; "a mic pack is viewable on the back of her shorts"; "a cameraman is viewable in the kitchen." And we ourselves are viewable in every line. Which brings home the degree to which we are all simultaneously exhibitionists and voyeurs under what Guy Debord would have called Spectacle. Or, maybe (as Tiqqun might ventriloquize Debord), we're all just girlfriends. Because "girlfriends tell each other what's really going on." But then again, as Wife Kyle notes, "her reality and my reality are two very different things." And ultimately, "we don't have any real proof" because our constructions now are false only so so long as they are actually documented: "Look! It‘s what I‘m hearing, huh. It‘s fake. Camera, camera [...] Watch this. She isn‘t real. Look." Look again. Watch this closely. Read this through. Somewhere, "My Reality" by Jordan Pruitt is playing. "And that‘s hard for me to believe, honestly. The reality, the reality, the reality of it, I am like honest girl beyond belief." -Craig Dworkin, critic and author of No Medium
“E! Entertainment shows readers bodies wrenching awkwardly with desire, anxiety, and physical pain, struggling with each other and talking to each other and dramatizing in public the fact of themselves. What finally turns the book into a kind of contemporary gothic is the developing dread, the sense that the whole show is leading in the direction of decay and collapse. The voyeur watches others go through their act of pain and dying in order to avoid the uncomfortable and unspoken truth that the voyeur too is headed in the same direction.” -Mark Wallace, Thinking Again
"I realize I’m not holding the remote. Durbin is. Her [stories] press pause or fast forward or slow stuff down. Moments get reborn. I get reminded of how the literary arts can have an alchemical effect on time. However, when Durbin uses her alchemy to transform something that is already unreal, reality TV, the result is unnamable. You can’t slow down time where time doesn’t exist. Yet Durbin does. She’s a witch." -Myriam Gurba, Radar Productions
“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. 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 is [Durbin’s 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 Heroines
"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 Sky Saw
“Durbin's rendition of the Real Housewives shows, by returning our focus to the very nature of the suffering (and pleasure) of the Housewife, challenges us to do something other than disavow the castrated woman by exposing the lie of the Housewife, which is the lie of the Dead-girl, the always already failed and corpsed woman, which is, at its core, the lie of Capital.” -Amanda Montei, PQ
“In addition to reminding us that reality is often stranger than fiction, Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment captures the specific absurdity of reality that comes to life on the page even more than on television. With an unparalleled eye for detail and a scientific commitment to objectivity…E! Entertainment is a fascinating and insightful read that dazzles like its thousand Hollywood smiles and chills with the subtleties that often go unnoticed on TV.” -Small Press Distribution Editor’s Pick
"Durbin breaks down reality television…into a vivarium of microdetail. The scripted moments of the Real Housewives shows transform into something else entirely when beamed from televised drama into ecosystems of language, fashion, and class." -Bookish