The original Ritalin kid, Harmony Korine burst onto the scene with Kids, a film so gritty and unsettling in its depiction of teen sex that it was slapped with a NC-17 rating and banned in theaters across the country. In some ways, the media frenzy over the rating overshadowed the harrowing portrait of teenagers destroying their lives and the eighteen-year-old screenwriter who created them. "Whether you see it as a masterpiece or as sensationalism", wrote Lynn Hirshberg, "the movie is relentless and brilliant and extremely disturbing. It's powerful -- both steel-eyed and sexy; horrifying and captivating".

Now, in this book of fictional set pieces, Korine reinvents the novel form, capturing the fragmented moments of life observed through the demented lens of media, TV, and teen obsession. With a filmmaker's eye and a prankster's glee, this bizarre collection of jokes, half-remembered scenes, dialogue fragments, movie ideas, and suicide notes is an episodic, epigrammatic ode to the world of images. This is the ultimate postmodern video novel -- funny, offensive, primitive. Korine is the voice of his media-savvy generation, and "A Crack-Up At The Race Riots" is the satiric love child of his darkly bizarre imagination.

"Kids is far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective. Think of it not as cinema verite but as a new strain of post-apocalyptic science fiction, using hyperbole to magnify a kernel of terrible, undeniable truth". -- Janet Maslin, The New York Times