Kamikaze Lust

By: Lauren Sanders

Narrated by: Helen Laser

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 Panpocalyse, The Not Wives, 16 Pills and The Stalker Chronicles, and a clinical professor of writing and creative production at NYU.

©2000 Akashic Books (P)2025 Lauren Sanders