Try A Novel

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