<div>&ldquo;Artificial Light beats the bejeezus out of the last dozen Thomas Pynchons, the last nineteen Don DeLillos, and the last forty-three Kurt Vonneguts.&rdquo;&mdash;Richard Meltzer &ldquo;In his ambitious and intriguing debut novel, indie rock expert Greer, author of Guided by Voices, employs one of literature&#39;s oldest gambits, the book-within-a-book structure, three times over. A young librarian calling herself Fiat Lux fills a set of notebooks with her passion for books and an enigmatic account of her interlude with Kurt C, a famous indie rock star who appears unheralded in Dayton, Ohio, and buys the long-abandoned Orville Wright mansion. A member of the rock group Whiskey Ships is trying to write about his musical odyssey but longs to return to his book about Orville Wright, whose long-lost diaries also feed the narrative stream. Greer picks the lock on the Kurt Cobain mythos and the rapid commercialization of indie rock&hellip;Strong writing and shrewd perceptions prevail, backed by wry humor, compelling stumblebum characters, a true-blue louche atmosphere, and arresting insights into the dream of art, be it literature or rock and roll.&rdquo;&mdash;Booklist</div>

Amazon

Apple

Barnes & Noble

Google

Kobo

Buy From US

Artificial Light

<div>The first novel in the notorious, award-winning George Miles Cycle&mdash;&rdquo;a crowning achievement in American letters [from] a master of transgressive fiction&rdquo; (Tony O&rsquo;Neill, The Guardian, UK). Proclaimed &ldquo;the most dangerous writer in America&rdquo; by the Village Voice, Dennis Cooper began his controversial novel cycle with Closer, introducing readers to the enigmatic George Miles. A physically beautiful and strangely passive teenager, George attracts his fellow students with irresistible mystery, like a wallet lying on the street. One after another, his friends rifle through him searching for love or simply momentary relief from the mindlessness of middle America. George passes through the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, who turns his parents&rsquo; garage into a nightclub. But George remains a tantalizing blur until he&rsquo;s picked up by two men in their forties. Tom and Philippe, obsessed with the beauty of death, believe George to be the perfect object for their passion. Like Jean Genet and William Burroughs, Dennis Cooper assaults the senses as he engages the mind in this &ldquo;bleak and brilliant&rdquo; novel that deserves recognition as &ldquo;(at least) a minor classic&rdquo; (John Ash, The Washington Post Book World).</div>

Closer

<div>A brilliant novel of LA&rsquo;s underground from the author of Closer, &ldquo;the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction&rdquo; (Bret Easton Ellis). Chris is a young porn star who wants to experience death at someone else&rsquo;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. &ldquo;The most seductively frightening, best written novel of contemporary urban life that anyone has attempted in a long time; it&rsquo;s the funniest, too.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times Book Review &ldquo;With Guide, America&rsquo;s most daring novelist has given us his masterpiece.&rdquo; &mdash;The Face &ldquo;Make[s] American Psycho and Lolita seem tame . . . A brilliantly base tale of human self-destruction for the brave.&rdquo; &mdash;The Times (London) &ldquo;Dante&rsquo;s Inferno with George Bataille as your escort, damaged yet exhilarating.&rdquo; &mdash;Arena &ldquo;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.&rdquo; &mdash;Library Journal</div>

Guide

<div>The author of Closer &ldquo;transcends the formulaic with exquisite writing on the level of Rimbaud&rsquo;s Illuminations . . . an American masterpiece&rdquo; (James McCourt, Los Angeles Times). 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&mdash;at the expense of his job and marriage&mdash;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. &ldquo;This beautiful book is a first-person narration of how grief grows and morphs after a death, and its style and naked pain make the reader feel like he has suffered a concussion . . . Carefully wrought in Cooper&rsquo;s trademark short, clipped sentences. There&rsquo;s no room for the pain to hide, and Cooper lays it bare with humor and striking honesty.&rdquo; &mdash;Time Out Chicago &ldquo;God Jr. is probably Cooper&rsquo;s richest, most philosophical novel to date. If the cycle were a video game, this would be its Easter egg.&rdquo; &mdash;SF Gate &ldquo;Absorbing . . . carefully spare, pop-cultures prose that has earned him a cult following.&rdquo; &mdash;Entertainment Weekly</div>

God Jr.

<div>The final novel in the award-winning George Miles Cycle. &ldquo;A triumphant finale to one of the most intense series of novels ever written&rdquo; (Mondo). The stunning conclusion to Dennis Cooper&rsquo;s five-book cycle, Period earned its author the accolade &ldquo;a disquieting genius&rdquo; by Vanity Fair and praise for his &ldquo;elegant prose and literary lawlessness&rdquo; from The New York Times. Breathtaking and mesmerizing, it is the culmination of Cooper&rsquo;s explorations into sex and death, youth culture, and the search for the ineffable object of desire. Cooper has taken his familiar themes&mdash;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&mdash;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&rsquo;s finest writers. &ldquo;A fascinating, intricately crafted jewel of a book . . . It&rsquo;s a book one could read over and over and never exhaust.&rdquo; &mdash;San Francisco Chronicle Book Review &ldquo;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&rsquo;s dizzying possibilities.&rdquo; &mdash;The Guardian &ldquo;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.&rdquo; &mdash;Salon &ldquo;Haunting.&rdquo; &mdash;Details</div>

Period

<div>Third in the George Miles Cycle: &ldquo;It is finally time to admit that Cooper&mdash;whose work is constantly compared to Genet, Baudelaire, etc.&mdash;is like no other&rdquo; (Paper). 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 pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a journal that he calls I Apologize. Try follows Closer and Frisk in Dennis Cooper&rsquo;s award-winning George Miles Cycle, &ldquo;a crowning achievement in American letters&mdash;a moment where a New World writer has created something as beguiling, baffling, beautiful and intelligent as anything by Genet or Joyce&rdquo; (The Guardian). &ldquo;There was a rumor that Cooper&rsquo;s new book was going to be a &lsquo;nice&rsquo; one after the dark nightmare of Frisk, but Try is even more shocking. It may also be his most perfectly structured and moving work.&rdquo; &mdash;Paper &ldquo;As improbable as it may seem, Dennis Cooper has written a love story, all the more poignant because it is so brutally crushed.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times Book Review</div>

<div>Second in the award-winning George Miles Cycle, &ldquo;as intense a dissection of human relationships and obsession that modern literature has ever attempted&rdquo; (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: &ldquo;I see these criminals on the news who&rsquo;ve killed someone methodically, and they&rsquo;re free. They know something amazing. You can just tell.&rdquo; An isolated windmill in Holland provides the perfect setting for Dennis to find out more about bodies&mdash;of which there are many&mdash;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. &ldquo;A significant work of fiction. Cooper . . . wants to lead us into the wormy heart of the murderous impulse.&rdquo; &mdash;Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize&ndash;winning author of The Hours &ldquo;Destined to classic status.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times Book Review &ldquo;Dennis Cooper, a disturbing and transcendent artist, enters the mind of a killer and comes out with genuine revelation.&rdquo; &mdash;Michael Silverblatt, host of Bookworm &ldquo;An electrifying study in carnage.&rdquo; &mdash;The Sunday Times</div>

Frisk

<div>From literary cult hero Dennis Cooper comes his most haunting work to date. &#8220;An American master&#8230;. Cooper is the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs.&#8221; --SalonIn secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape&#8212;and the most compelling clue to its final nature is &#8220;the marbled swarm&#8221; 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.</div>

The Marbled Swarm

<div>&#8220;In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper&#8217;s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe.&#8221; &#8212;New York Times Book Review &#8220;His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.&#8221; &#8212; San Francisco Chronicle"There&#8217;s a stainless steel sheen to Cooper&#8217;s sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." &#8212; SalonFrom the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of &#8220;the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction&#8221; (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues&#8212;including the touchstone piece &#8220;AIDS: Words from the front&#8221;; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper. </div>

Smothered in Hugs

<div>Thirty years of interviews that offer &ldquo;a window into the minds and the writing processes of some of the world&rsquo;s best practitioners of poetry and prose&rdquo; (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Since 1981, the quarterly magazine Bomb has been the gold standard for artist-on-artist interviews, showcasing writers, performers, actors, musicians, painters, and architects. The founders, a group of New York City&ndash;based artists, wanted a public space for art-makers to talk to each other about their work without the interference of critics or journalists. Thirty years later comes this anthology: an addictively insightful collection of thirty-five interviews with some of the world&rsquo;s most thought-provoking, funny, profound, compelling authors. It includes literary luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill, Junot D&iacute;az, Sharon Olds, Amy Hempel, Martin Amis, Jeffrey Eugenides, Sapphire, Edwidge Danticat, and Jennifer Egan, among many others, as well as an introduction by Francine Prose. These authors speak frankly about the joys and the pain that inform their work, the influence of family, ambition, criticism, and the sinking, thrilling knowledge of their own mortality. This is Bomb Magazine&rsquo;s gift to readers: a glimpse into the minds that created the books which informed you, challenged you, yanked on your heartstrings and touched your soul. &ldquo;Bomb: The Author Interviews brings together a selection of conversations in a handsome anthology. The book, which offers 35 of the magazine&rsquo;s interviews, is both a primer on authorial strategies and a record of the evolution of an iconic literary institution.&rdquo; &mdash;The Washington Post &ldquo;BOMB&rsquo;s author interview series, which has been going for years, is one of the most inspiring dialogues between writers available.&rdquo; &mdash;Bustle &ldquo;These are not your run of the mill author interviews featuring a journalist throwing canned questions at a writer, these are conversations between writers and delve into the essence of creativity . . . Essential reading for any admirer of contemporary literature.&rdquo; &mdash;Seattle Post-Intelligencer </div>

Dennis Cooper
Follow this author

Books By Dennis Cooper (8 Books)

Closer

Guide

God Jr.

Period

Try

Frisk

The Marbled Swarm

Smothered in Hugs

Get weekly updates and deals from Early Bird Books

More from

Corporate

© 2024 OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Dennis CooperFollow this author