Works by
Dennis Cooper
(Writer)
[January 10, 1953 - ]

Fiction

• God Jr. (2005)
  A skateboarder, a real estate agent, a car crash, a folk art monument, a famous psychic, a digital orthophotography specialist, a videogame, a talking plant, an evil snowman, and much more in Dennis Cooper's eighth novel.

• The Sluts (2005) -- Finalist, 2005 Lambda Literary Award for Male Fiction
  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.

• My Loose Thread (2002)
  Dennis Cooper's latest novel has emerged as his finest, most thought-provoking and challenging piece of writing yet. At the heart of the work is Larry, a teenager who is struggling to understand not only his sexuality and physical feelings toward his younger brother but also the purpose and reason behind his own existence. Larry is offered $500 to kill a fellow pupil and retrieve the boy's notebook. It all seems straightforward enough. However, once Larry ventures into the notebook, complications arise. Captivated by both the beauty of its articulation and the horror of its content, he longs for such an ability to communicate himself. Written in sparse yet concentrated language that surrounds, submerges, and potentially overwhelms the reader, My Loose thread is a claustrophobic, harrowing, and intensely moving piece of fiction.

• Safe (1984)

• My Mark (1982)

• Antoine Monnier (1978)

Series
Chronicle of angst ridden teens in Los Angeles.

1. Closer (1989)
   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.

2. Frisk (1991)
   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.

3. Try (1992)
   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 porn videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie.

4. Guide (1997)
   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 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.

5. Period (2000)
   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.

Non-fiction

• All Ears (1999)
  Dennis Cooper is best known as the author of transgressive novels such as Guide and Try, but he's also done his share of journalism. All Ears collects work from a variety of publications, including a profile of Sonny Bono that originally appeared in George and pieces from Spin on former Hüsker Dü frontman Bob Mould and homeless HIV-positive youth in Los Angeles. Along the way, he asks Keanu Reeves if he's gay ("No ... but ya never know"), ponders the fascination with heroin among alternative bands from the early '90s, and meditates upon the deaths of River Phoenix, William S. Burroughs, and Kurt Cobain. All Ears is a slim but compelling volume that speaks to pop culture with probing intensity and authenticity.  -- Amazon.com

• Against Nature: A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men (1989)

Poetry

• The Weaklings (2008)
  Limited edition.

• The Dream Police: Selected Poems, 1969-1993 (1995)
  With each new novel, Dennis Cooper's reputation as the most daring and distinctive writer in America today is cemented. To anyone familiar with his writing--which the New York Times calls "taut, chillingly ironic," the Washington Post Book World terms "brilliant," and the Village Voice deems capable of "religious intensity"--it will come as no surprise that before he achieved success as a novelist, Dennis Cooper was best known as a poet.
  
  Cooper's first collection, Idols, is considered a classic of gay literature, and his second, The Tenderness of the Wolves, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His poems have been sampled by rock bands and appear in several important anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, and American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late. He has also been featured in the PBS series The United States of Poetry.
  
  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 that led critics to dub him "the spokesperson for the Blank Generation," to his later experimental pieces, Cooper's evolving study of the distances and dangers in romantic relationships has made him a singular voice in American poetry.
  
  The Dream Police is a vital addition to Dennis Cooper's riveting and disarming vision of life, love, obsession, and the depths of human need.

• He Cried: Poems and Stories (1984)

• The Missing Men (1981)

• The Tenderness of the Wolves (1981) -- Nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
  Poetry

• Idols (1979, 1989)

• Tiger Beat (1978)

• The Terror of Earrings (1973)

Short Fiction/Stories

• Ugly Man (2009 release)
  Short fiction

• Wrong (1993)
  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.”

Other

• "Two Texts for a Puppet Play by David Brooks" (2008) with Stephen O'Malley

• Dennis (2006)
  CD/book.

• Horror Hospital Unplugged: A Graphic Novel (1996) with Keith Mayerson, Illustrator

• Jerk (1992) with Nayland Blake, Illustrator

• Discontents: New Queer Writers (1991)

See also:

• Paul Hegarty and Danny Kennedy, editors, Writing at the Edge: The Work of Dennis Cooper (Sussex University Press, March 2008)

• Leora Lev, editor, Enter at Your Own Risk: The Dangerous Art of Dennis Cooper (FDU Press, 2006) Includes essays on Cooper's work by William Burroughs, Michael Cunningham, Dodie Bellamy, John Waters, Kevin Killian, Matthew Stadler, Robert Gluck, Elizabeth Young, and others.

• James Bolton, director, Dennis Cooper, a 20 minute documentary film (2000)

• Something Inside: Conversations With Gay Fiction Writers (1980, 1999)  by Philip Gambone, Compiler and Robert Giard, Photographer
  In the last twenty years, gay literature has earned a place at the American and British literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. No one though, until Philip Gambone, has attempted to offer a collective portrait of our most important gay writers. This collection of interviews attempts just that, and is notable both for the depth of Gambone's probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included. Virtually every prominent gay author writing in English today is here, including Alan Hollinghurst, Allen Barnett, Andrew Holleran, Bernard Cooper, Brad Gooch, Brian Keith Jackson, Christopher Bram, David Leavitt, David Plante, Dennis Cooper, Edmund White, Gary Glickman, John Preston, Joseph Hansen, Lev Raphael, Michael Cunningham, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Nava, Paul Monette, Peter Cameron, and Scott Heim.