In Paradise, Hollings tells the story of three kings who squandered everything they had in a grandiose spectacle of waste: King Ludwig II of Bavaria, “King of Rock’n’Roll” Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop,” all shared the same doomed innocence. Their lives and early deaths were connected through individual displays of unfettered extravagance that brought them to the very edge of ruin. Each of them lived out their personal ideals of beauty and pleasure—even after the money was gone.

The follow up to Inferno and Purgatory, Paradise is the final volume in Ken Hollings’ The Trash Project, a three-part series of personal reflections on Trash and Trash Aesthetics. In this reworking of Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, Hollings presents Heaven as a place of rebellious, but tragic, self-indulgence. As he notes in his introduction: “You have to be in Heaven to see Hell.”

 [publishers’ note]