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Dennis Cooper (1953
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 Guide
by
Dennis Cooper
As
the New York Times writes, "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 ... This is high
risk literature." Guide is, in fact, a guide--a
shifting map of the inner world of 'Dennis,' the narrator, who for
the first time puts himself directly in the story, in order to
reveal all the nuances of his imagination ("a freezer
compartment for violent thoughts.") Readers of his previous
novels, Frisk
and Try,
will be especially fascinated by the way that the dark imagery of
beautiful boys and the older men who worship/violate/destroy them
is turning back on itself and elaborating into ever more
meticulous examinations of experience. Does writing these
"snuff fairy tales" serve as a banishing ritual for
'Dennis,' who admits that he is "perfectly capable of
evil"? It's left to the reader to decide.
Period
by
Dennis Cooper
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.
 The
Dream Police : Selected Poems, 1969-1993 by
Dennis Cooper
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. "The
best of coopers work is not in the novels but here in his
powerful, utterly original poems and short verse pieces. Where
readers might become bored or confused or unsettled at coopers run
on in his long works, here is coopers intelligence in tight,
detailed emotion. A perfect read." -- Anonymous Review
 Wrong
: Stories by
Dennis Cooper
A collection of
short stories that provide an evolution of the author's writings.
Daring to use death to look at life, Cooper provides a new
perspective on the reader's deepest fears and needs.
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by Alexander Laurence © 1995
Excerpt:
For all practical purposes, the body is a
machine with all this stuff inside. I guess the characters in all
my books are like this, though not so much in the new one, Try.
Since they don't believe in religious stuff. You just see what's
in front of you. And what's in front of you is this body, right?
It has all this appeal to you, and you desire it, or you are
fascinated by the body. In many ways, you are just like a kid, and
kids try to take things like toys apart to see how they work.
These are people who figure "Well, if I open up this body and
look what's inside it, I'll know what makes me feel so
overwhelmed, or so out of control when I'm with this person."
It just that: trying to deal with people in a practical way. Even
if you think that there's spirituality, or something; you can't
take apart the mind and figure what it's like. These are people
who objectify other people into being like that, as a way to try
to figure things out, and they willfully ignore emotion and
spirituality and all that stuff. The body interests me in that
way, and it interests me that the text is like a body. I like the
writing to be eviscerated too, opened up in different ways...
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By Daniel Reitz for Solon.com
With his excoriating, hallucinatory, viciously
funny vision, he's the most important transgressive literary
artist since William S. Burroughs -- but even Burroughs didn't get
death threats...
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By David Leddy for Outcast
Magazine
Excerpt:
‘It got so boring,’ he tells
me. ‘You know, journalists would ask me “Do you really watch
snuff movies?” So, it’s easier now because people don’t
treat me like a monster any more. They’ve come to realize that
this is literature. They don’t believe that these are my
personal fantasies.’
If the work has remained the
same, though, why have people’s reactions changed so much?
‘It’s because gay people don’t read books anymore,’ he
tells me flatly. ‘When I was first publishing, there was a boom
of gay fiction in America. It was a big, trendy thing. I was set
up as the demon and David Leavitt, who wrote The Lost Language
of the Cranes, was set up as the angel. Gay culture hadn’t
really developed a cinema or anything yet, so a lot of gay guys
read books, which they just don’t do anymore. So, there was a
lot of misunderstanding and hatred of my work because of that.
They would read the book just because they heard it was “a gay
book” and then be appalled because they saw it as an attack on
eroticism or an attack on gay lifestyles, which it was never
intended to be...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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