I Wished

I Wished

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Soho Press

Published: 2021-09-14

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 1641293055

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“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.


Frisk

Frisk

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 1555847730

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Second in the award-winning George Miles Cycle, “as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted” (The Guardian). When Dennis is thirteen, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. Dennis is not shocked but stunned by their mystery and their power; their glimpse at the reality of death. Some years later, Dennis meets the boy who posed for the photographs. He did it for love. Surrounded by images of violence, the celebrity of horror, news of disease, a wasteland of sex, Dennis flies to Europe, having discovered some clues about the photographs: “I see these criminals on the news who’ve killed someone methodically, and they’re free. They know something amazing. You can just tell.” An isolated windmill in Holland provides the perfect setting for Dennis to find out more about bodies—of which there are many—and what is inside them. In Frisk, as in the award-winning Closer, Dennis Cooper explores the limits of our knowledge and the dividing line between the body and the spirit. Frisk is a novel about the power of fantasy and faith, about the ecstasy and horror of being human. “A significant work of fiction. Cooper . . . wants to lead us into the wormy heart of the murderous impulse.” —Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours “Destined to classic status.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a killer and comes out with genuine revelation.” —Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm “An electrifying study in carnage.” —The Sunday Times


Try

Try

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780802133380

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In this title, Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, turns to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos, and his best friend, a junkie, in a complex tale of sexuality, abuse, and attraction.


Wrong

Wrong

Author: Diarmuid Hester

Publisher: University of Iowa Press

Published: 2020-06-01

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1609386914

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Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade. In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post–War avant-garde.


The Sluts

The Sluts

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2005-10-19

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780786716746

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Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.


Period

Period

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 1555847714

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The final novel in the award-winning George Miles Cycle. “A triumphant finale to one of the most intense series of novels ever written” (Mondo). The stunning conclusion to Dennis Cooper’s five-book cycle, Period earned its author the accolade “a disquieting genius” by Vanity Fair and praise for his “elegant prose and literary lawlessness” from The New York Times. Breathtaking and mesmerizing, it is the culmination of Cooper’s explorations into sex and death, youth culture, and the search for the ineffable object of desire. Cooper has taken his familiar themes—strangely irresistible and interchangeable young men, passion that crosses into murder, the lure of drugs, the culpabilities of authorship, and the inexact, haunting communication of feeling—and melded them into a novel of flawless form and immense power. Set in a spare, smoke-and-mirror-filled world of secret websites, Goth bands, Satanism, pornography, and outsider art, Period is a literary disappearing act as mysterious as it is logical. Obsessive, beautiful, and darkly comic, Period is a stunning achievement from one of America’s finest writers. “A fascinating, intricately crafted jewel of a book . . . It’s a book one could read over and over and never exhaust.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review “To read Period (a book so intricate, it comes with its own strategy guide) is to witness the idea of the novel itself imploding; to glimpse the end of language; to become aware of literature’s dizzying possibilities.” —The Guardian “An elegy to the nature of obsessive love, the need to feel . . . [Cooper] is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs.” —Salon “Haunting.” —Details


Guide

Guide

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published: 2007-12-01

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1555847749

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A brilliant novel of LA’s underground from the author of Closer, “the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction” (Bret Easton Ellis). Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else’s hand; Mason has lurid fantasies about members of British pop bands; Sniffles is a teenage runaway whose need for love outweighs his attachment to life. Courtesy of a frankly manipulative author/narrator named Dennis, these characters move through a subterranean Los Angeles where hallucination and reality, sex and suicide, love and indifference run together in terrifying ways. Guide, the fourth novel in a projected five-book cycle, continues to explore the boundaries of experience in the manner that has earned Dennis Cooper comparisons to Poe, Genet, and Baudelaire. “The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it’s the funniest, too.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “With Guide, America’s most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece.” —The Face “Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave.” —The Times (London) “Dante’s Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating.” —Arena “Though the story is as compelling as it is perverse, Cooper purposefully overrides it with an innovative style and raw, truthful character studies . . . With Guide, Cooper claims his place, alongside Genet and Burroughs, as a master of his own disenfranchised generation.” —Library Journal


The Marbled Swarm

The Marbled Swarm

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2011-11-01

Total Pages: 129

ISBN-13: 0062101595

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From literary cult hero Dennis Cooper comes his most haunting work to date. “An American master…. Cooper is the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs.” --Salon In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape—and the most compelling clue to its final nature is “the marbled swarm” itself, a complex amalgam of language passed down from father to son. Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, where the trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender. And as the narrator stalks an elusive truth, traveling from the French countryside to Paris and back again, the reader will be seduced by a voice only Dennis Cooper could create.


Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper

Author: Paul Hegarty

Publisher: Apollo Books

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781845195526

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Dennis Cooper's writing has acquired a ferocious reputation for its bold experimentation, its transgressive content, and its emotional content, which is both Romantic and touching, whilst cold and hard-edged. For over twenty years Cooper has explored the boundaries of human living, and sexuality's centrality to that living. The extreme situations he develops in his writing bring out parts of gay experience that a consensual 'community' often shies away from, likewise the heterosexual mainstream. His most important genre is undoubtedly fiction, but Cooper has also written poetry, large quantities of journalistic works, notably for 'Artforum' and 'Spin', and, recently has had great success and recognition with theatrical works. The book enters deep into the worlds Cooper fabricates -- and into the coolness of his expression. This challenging work is addressed by a group of mostly young and new critical writers and academics who provide creative responses to Cooper's artistry. The contributions, which cover the breadth of Cooper's work, develop themes and devices that advance his profound and disturbing world view. In addition to the artistic responses, the topics in the critical pieces range from sexuality in the suburbs, to neurological responses to the work, via the limits and possibilities of bodies. Others look at the implications of contemporary electronic communication as outlined in Cooper's recent work, or the use of space. Cooper's writing receives a multi-faceted contextualisation, and his literary ideas are made accessible to any reader interested in learning why Cooper is today regarded as one of the foremost writers in expressing the psychological point behind the centrality of sexual expression.


The Dream Police

The Dream Police

Author: Dennis Cooper

Publisher: Grove Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 9780802134578

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The Dream Police collects the best poems from five of his previous books and also includes a selection of new works. From his darkly erotic early verse to the more refined, post-punk poems, to his later experimental pieces. Cooper's evolving study of the distances in romantic relationships has made him a singular voice in American poetry.