Noughties - by Kate Durbin (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A glittering reimagining of her cult classic E! Entertainment, which was ahead of its time in taking the "bimbos" of reality TV seriously, Noughties reanimates the media systems that made the women of the 2000s into spectacle and then swallowed us all.

In Kate Durbin's Noughties, a creepy yet charming docent leads us through the labyrinth of the Playboy Mansion, gossiping and pointing out every dog turd and missing bowl of cocaine. In new and reworked writings from E!, Kim Kardashian's wedding decays into a hyper-branded, glitching gothic, The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills' "Dinner Party from Hell" transmutes into occult séance, and a meticulously transcribed episode of The Hills turns vocal fry and Balenciaga motorcycle bags into dream grammar.

Most pieces in Noughties were first composed through Durbin's process of intensive surfacing, where she would watch a few frames of a show, pause, write down everything she saw, and then transform the material into poems and stories. A completely new addition, Durbin's playful ink drawings bring in Bridget Marquardt's pink Hello Kitty bedroom, tabloids as poems, and Paris and Nicole "that's hot" rewatch memes, for a feverish, singular artwork of a dirty decade that never really ended.

Review Quotes

"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, Flavorwire

"Kate Durbin calls attention to the types of criticisms regularly lauded at women in the public eye. She 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 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

About the Author

Kate Durbin is a writer and artist from Los Angeles. She is the author of five books. Hoarders was named a best book of the year by Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and NPR. Noughties (Wave, 2027), a reimagining of her cult 2014 book E! Entertainment, includes new drawings and rewrites of the original poems and stories.