Dennis Cooper Books In Order

George Miles Cycle Books In Order

  1. Closer (1989)
  2. Frisk (1991)
  3. Try (1994)
  4. Guide (1997)
  5. Period (2000)
  6. I Wished (2021)

Novels

  1. Safe (1984)
  2. My Loose Thread (2002)
  3. The Sl*uts (2004)
  4. God Jr. (2005)
  5. The Marbled Swarm (2011)

Collections

  1. Wrong (1992)
  2. Jerk (1993)
  3. Ugly Man (2009)

Graphic Novels

  1. Horror Hospital Unplugged (1996)

Non fiction

  1. Against Nature (1989)
  2. All Ears (1999)
  3. Tom Friedman (2001)
  4. Raymond Pettibon (2001)
  5. Smothered in Hugs (2010)

George Miles Cycle Book Covers

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Graphic Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Dennis Cooper Books Overview

Closer

Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles becomes the object of his friends passions and, one after another, they ransack him for love or anything else they can trust in the vacuum of middle America. What they find assaults the senses as it engages the mind, in a novel that explores the limits of experience.

Frisk

In Frisk, Dennis Cooper explores the ultimate meaning of the body, sex, and death. The novel’s narrator, a thirteen year old boy, is stunned when he encounters photos of a mutilated boy; his imagination leads him on a journey in which sexual urges start to fuse with grisly fantasies and desires he doesn t understand.

Try

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 po*rn videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie.

Guide

Chris is a young po*rn 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 and more 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.

Period

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, po*rnography, 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.

My Loose Thread

Following on from the stunning conclusion to his five book cycle that was Period, Dennis Cooper reemerges with arguably his finest and most thought provoking piece of writing. At the heart of the work is Larry, a teenager wrestling not only with his sexuality and the implications of a physical relationship with his younger brother but with the purpose and the reason to his existence. He is numb. Dead. Expression cannot contain reality. Yet…
As the book opens, Larry has been paid $500 by a senior high school student to kill a fellow pupil and retrieve the boy’s notebook. It seems simple enough. However, once Larry ventures into the notebook, complications arise. Struck at once by both the beauty of articulation and the horror of its content, Larry longs for such an ability to communicate but feels powerless: is there a place for sincerity or concern, or indeed love? My Loose Thread may share the anarchic sensibility of Cooper’s earlier works and touch upon such themes as alienation, obsession, inarticulacy, longing, and frustration, but this is a new Cooper and signals exactly where he is heading as a novelist. The writing is sparse, concise yet open, the consequence being that the reader falls into this world and is surrounded, submerged, and potentially overwhelmed by the text. My Loose Thread is a claustrophobic read and a harrowing piece of fiction that is all the more so for the gracefulness of the language. ‘Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.’ William S. Burroughs ‘Cooper is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs…
. An American master.’ Salon ‘ Cooper has come closer than anyone to reanimating the spirit of Burroughs…
. Haunting.’ The Village Voice Literary Supplement ‘Cooper’s synaesthetic subliminal metaphors should be outlawed, so quickly and lethally do they sink into your subconscious.’ Bookforum ‘A disquieting genius.’ Vanity Fair ‘Elegant prose and literary lawlessness…
high risk literature.’ The New York Times

The Sl*uts

Written between 1994 and 2002, The Sl*uts is a black sheep cousin to Dennis Cooper’s internationally acclaimed George Miles Cycle. 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 Sl*uts chronicles the evolution of one young escort’s date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of po*rnography, 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 Sl*uts is Cooper’s most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.

God Jr.

Dennis Cooper’s sparely crafted novels have earned him an international reputation even as his subject matter has made him a controversial figure. God Jr. is a stunningly accomplished new novel that marks a new phase in Cooper’s noteworthy career. God Jr. is the story of Jim, a father who survived the car crash that killed his teenage son Tommy. Tommy was distant, transfixed by video games and pop culture, and a mystery to the man who raised him. Now, disabled by the accident, yearning somehow to absolve his own guilt over the crash, Jim becomes obsessed with a mysterious building Tommy drew repetitively in a notebook before he died. As the fixation grows, Jim starts to take on elements of his son at the expense of his job and marriage but is he connecting with who Tommy truly was? A tender, wrenching look at guilt, grief, and the tenuous bonds of family, God Jr. is unlike anything Dennis Cooper has yet written. It is a triumphant achievement from one of our finest writers.

Wrong

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.

Jerk

The confession of serial killer David Brooks provides the starting point for Cooper’s eerie tale, oddly illustrated by Blake’s marionettes and puppets.

Ugly Man

A short story from the collection Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper.

All Ears

A collection of this well known novelist’s penetrating interviews and insight into the time’s leading cultural luminaries, including Leonardo Di Caprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and River Phoenix.

Tom Friedman

The work of Tom Friedman captures for many the essence of art at the beginning of a new century: modest in scale; imaginative and ecological; painstakingly crafted and ‘unheroic’. Friedman suggests a new direction in art post video; post political/identity issues; post digital media; post ready mades. He works in a windowless studio more like a playground kitchen laboratory in rural Masachusetts, relentlessly inventing these startling ephemeral objects ‘out of the stuff in my house’ bits of Styrofoam, packing material, bottle tops, pencil shavings, plastic straws, dental floss, spaghetti, toothpicks, bubble gum. Some of his works are too delicate to move, and exist above all in photographs and in the imagination. This is art which, to quote ‘New York Times’ critic Roberta Smith again, ‘raises wonderful questions about the making and seeing of art’, about paying attention, about how we spend our time, and about the pleasures of small transformations producing sudden beauty. Solo exhibitions of Tom Friedman‘s works have been held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. A major touring exhibition of his work, ‘Tom Friedman: The Epic in the Everyday’, in 2000 2002 is at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts, San Francisco, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and Southeastern Centre for Contemporary Art, Winston Salem, North Carolina.

Raymond Pettibon

In the early 1980s California based artist Raymond Pettibon first began making his signature inkwash drawings combinations of cartoon like images with short, enigmatic texts to adorn the record covers of underground music groups like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. After turning a generation of punk fans into unwitting art collectors, Pettibon was gradually picked up by the established art world as an artist producing some of the most unusual new representational artwork being made. Although he also produced paintings, collages, artist’s book, videos and fanzines, Pettibon is known for his prolific production of drawings. These drawings have a great cumulative effect; they become increasingly intriguing the more one sees of them. Much has been made of Pettibon’s literary background and reclusive personality as the biographical sources for these humorous yet dark, complex pictures. Yet the artist claims that his work has nothing to do with his own experience but is culled from the printed pages of American popular underground culture: Gumby, Ronald Reagan, surfers, Joan Crawford. At times his drawings seem almost dashed off from a comic strip; other are more painstakingly drawn. Most are in a simple graphic style combined with bits of text sometimes weiredly connected to the imagery, but often providing baffling non sequiturs. His unusual draftsmanship and mysterious personality have made him one of the most sought after artists currently working in America. After appearing in numerous Whitney Biennials, in recent years Pettibon had his first museum organized retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Drawing Centre with more than 500 drawings covering some 20 years’ work, establishing definitively his reputation in the uppermost ranks of contemporary American art.

Smothered in Hugs

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, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction of one of America’s greatest writers. Cooper has written on grave social issues, producing touchstone pieces for a generation of readers. His obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs offer portraits that are both crystallizing and appropriately indefinite. His reckonings of contemporary writers are astute and unsparing. And, of course, he serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities and does so with an acuity and fairness missing from most pop culture criticism.

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