Dennis Cooper is celebrated for his provocative engagement with contemporary American literature. His works, often set within dark and marginalized landscapes, delve into the complexities of identity, sexuality, and social alienation. Cooper's style is raw and unflinching, employing unconventional narrative structures to evoke powerful emotional responses from readers. His literary significance lies in his ability to push boundaries and reflect unsettling facets of modern existence.
The incredible variety of Acker's body of work has been distilled into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-20th century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life.
Narrated in a voice that may be construed as the author's own, Guide is the story of the conflict between a novelist's fantasy life and his inability to represent it in language. Remembering the clarity he felt during an LSD trip in his teens, 'Dennis' drops acid and attempts to write a novel that will make sense of his life, his desires, his friends, and his art. The fourth volume in Cooper's five-novel cycle, Guide is his most shocking study yet of the darker side of human need and the nature of desire. It reaffirms his position as a writer whose ability to transgress is matched by his literary brilliance.
“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.
Focusing on grave social issues and cultural commentary, the collection showcases the best nonfiction from one of America's prominent writers. It features insightful obituaries for figures like Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, delivering both clarity and ambiguity. The author's evaluations of contemporary writers are sharp and honest, while his observations of various cultural personalities reflect a unique blend of fairness and depth, setting a high standard for pop culture criticism.
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" by The New York Times. The culmination of Cooper's explorations into sex and death, youth culture, and the search for the ineffable object of desire, Period is a breathtaking, mesmerizing final statement to the five-book cycle it completes. 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 Web sites, 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] brilliant, triumphantly lurid writer as well as a supremely talented, elegant stylist whose prose is smart and nervy. He might also be the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.” —Bret Easton Ellis Internationally acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper continues to study the material he's always explored honestly, but does so now—in stories—with a sense of awareness and a satirical touch that exploits and winks at his mastery of this world. As it has done for decades, Cooper’s taut, controlled prose lays bare the compulsions and troubling emptiness of the human soul.
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.
A look at Ziggy's world, the adopted teen-age son of two gay men. A catalogue of child abuse, rape, sexual promiscuity and drugs. Through it all Ziggy tries to keep his bearings by writing a journal.
By daring to use death to look at life, Cooper gives us a new perspective on our deepest fears and needs. This collection of stories provides an overview of his evolution and, as William T. Vollmann wrote in The New York Times Book Review, a portrait of “our soulless and decaying society.”
When Dennis is 13, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. He is not shocked, but stunned by their mystery and 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. In his work, Dennis Cooper explores the dividing line between the body and the spirit. His first book Frisk is a novel about the power of fantasy and faith, about the ecstasy of being human. It is a work of unflinching honesty that refuses to allow the reader a vicarious, passive role in mapping out the relationship between desire, pornography and violence.
