Dennis Cooper

The Sluts

Il est allongé nu sur le futon, les poignets liés ensemble, les jambes écartées, les pieds qui dépassent du cadre. Un drap tordu, comme une tornade maigrichonne. Sur la première photo, ses longs cheveux noirs et raides lui tombent sur le visage, recouvrant tout, à part le bout de son nez, son menton, une pommette, un œil en partie fermé. Il a dix-sept ans. Son corps est trop contracté pour être mort ou endormi. Autour de son cou, il s'agit apparemment d'un nœud coulant.

Frisk

"I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can't handle." For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them. Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper's acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as "The George Miles Cycle." In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.

I Wished

The literary cult hero's latest novel takes readers into the mysterious world of a father who raises his son in secret and, keeping him isolated from outside influences, teaches him a special language that only the two of them will know.

a novel

The marbled swarm

A Novel

Closer

A teenager struggling to come to terms with his sexual identity and his physical feelings toward his younger brother, Larry is offered $500 to kill a fellow student and retrieve the boy's notebook, a personal volume that provides Larry with profound insights into his own life. Reprint.

My Loose Thread

Third in the George Miles Cycle: “It is finally time to admit that Cooper—whose work is constantly compared to Genet, Baudelaire, etc.—is like no other” (Paper). Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenage son of two sexually abusive fathers. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a journal that he calls I Apologize. Try follows Closer and Frisk in Dennis Cooper’s award-winning George Miles Cycle, “a crowning achievement in American letters—a moment where a New World writer has created something as beguiling, baffling, beautiful and intelligent as anything by Genet or Joyce” (The Guardian). “There was a rumor that Cooper’s new book was going to be a ‘nice’ one after the dark nightmare of Frisk, but Try is even more shocking. It may also be his most perfectly structured and moving work.” —Paper “As improbable as it may seem, Dennis Cooper has written a love story, all the more poignant because it is so brutally crushed.” —The New York Times Book Review

A father who has just lost his son in a car accident in which he was injured becomes obsessed with discovering the true identity of the dead boy, a moody, mysterious teenager who repeatedly drew the same building in his notebook. Original.

God Jr

Explores the psyches of four young gay men who are trying to alter their existance with drugs, violent erotic experiences, and love

Guide

Set in a world of secret Web sites, Goth culture, and satanism this black comedy of life on the fringes touches on the many aspects of modern-day America, such as pornography and outsider art as it follows a young man as he disappears into the underworld, in this final addition of the author's five-book cycle, which includes Closer and Frisk. Reprint.

Period

“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe.” —New York Times Book Review “His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.” — San Francisco Chronicle "There’s a stainless steel sheen to Cooper’s sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." — Salon From the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of “the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction” (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues—including the touchstone piece “AIDS: Words from the front”; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper.

Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries

Smothered in Hugs

A collection of short stories that use death to probe the meaning of life introduces a man who abducts, molests, and murders young boys; a trip to Amsterdam; and a teenage rock band called Horror Hospital

Stories

Wrong

stories

Ugly man

The Missing Men

Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice among other publications. Cooper serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities.

essays, interviews, feedback, and obituaries

Smothered in hugs

The Sluts by Cooper, DennisPaperback

Boy on the Far Left

Bruce Hainley

Adrian Searle

Tom Haimley

Tom Friedman

An initiation into the astonishing sculptures of this unusual artist.

Safe

A critically acclaimed poet offers a collection of the best poems from his previous books along with a selection of new works, from erotic verse to "post-punk" poems to experimental pieces exploring the risks and joys of gay relationships. Original.

Dennis Cooper

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