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In the Spotlight: Dennis Cooper
Jul. 1st, 2009 07:45 pm
The Book: 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. A dizzying pileup of bareback breeding, castration procedures, master-slave mind games, boyband necrophilia fantasies, and consensual snuff sex, The Sluts is this will sound strange the most enjoyable of Dennis Cooper's novels to date. It's a guilty pleasure, not in the middlebrow conception of the term, but in a radical, almost interactive sense: The reader, assuming the implicated vantage of the avid voyeur, cannot help suffering a twinge of complicity. --Dennis Lim, Village Voice
Cooper deserves reassessment, but until an Oprahesque crossover occurs, this compelling page turner ought to remind adventurous readers that important transgressive literature needn't be something only the French and the occasional perverted American can get behind. --Brandon Stosuy, L.A. Weekly
Not for the squeamish this sick, hilarious fictional excursion into the depths of hustler fantasy is for readers who appreciate Cooper s brilliant ability to dig truthfully into depravity. A paper edition was published in October by Carroll & Graf, but it's not as handsome as Void Books' original signed, limited edition. --Richard Labonte, San Francisco Bay Times
The Sluts holds nothing back, and it doesn't waste time with explanations or apologies... -- Jeff Koyen, New York Press
Amazon: The Sluts
( Other Books in the List )
The Author: Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Arcadia, California. His first forays into literature came early, focusing on imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade, and Baudelaire. As he began his teenage years, he wrote poetry and stories on scandalous and often extreme subjects. At the age of fifteen, he began to plan an ambitious novel cycle. This project, which took Cooper nearly twenty years to realize, would later become known as The George Miles Cycle. Cooper was an outsider and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners, and writers. After high school he attended Pasadena City College and, later, Pitzer College, where he had a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning. In 1976 Cooper went to England to become involved in the nascent punk scene. In the same year he began Little Caesar Magazine which included among other things an issue on and dedicated to Rimbaud. In 1978 with the success of the magazine, Cooper was able to found Little Caesar Press which featured the work of, among others, Brad Gooch, Amy Gerstler, Elaine Equi, Tim Dlugos, Joe Brainard, and Eileen Myles.
( Read more... )
Since the summer of 2005, Cooper has spent most of his time in Paris. While there, he has worked on his blog, which Cooper considers his current major artistic project, and has collaborated with the French theater director Gisele Vienne and composer Peter Rehberg on four works for the theater, I Apologize (2004), Un Belle Enfant Blonde (2005), KIndertotenlieder (2007), and a stage adaption of his novella Jerk (2008). These theater works have been highly acclaimed and continue to tour extensively in Europe, the UK, and Asia. While in France, Cooper finished a new book of poetry, The Weaklings, which was published in a limited edition by Fanzine Press in March 2008, and a collection of short fiction titled Ugly Man that will be published by Harper Perennial in 2009.
In addition to their United States editions, Cooper's novels and books of poetry have been published in Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Italy, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, China, and Japan. (From Wikipedia)
http://www.denniscooper.net/
Top 100 Gay Novels List (*)
External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (simple - without photos)
External Link to the Top 100 Gay Novels List (wanted - with photos)
*only one title per author, only print books released after January 1, 2000.
Other titles not in the top 100 list:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/top5
The Book: 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. 
The Author: Cooper grew up the son of a wealthy businessman in Arcadia, California. His first forays into literature came early, focusing on imitations of Rimbaud, Verlaine, de Sade, and Baudelaire. As he began his teenage years, he wrote poetry and stories on scandalous and often extreme subjects. At the age of fifteen, he began to plan an ambitious novel cycle. This project, which took Cooper nearly twenty years to realize, would later become known as The George Miles Cycle. Cooper was an outsider and the leader of a group of poets, punks, stoners, and writers. After high school he attended Pasadena City College and, later, Pitzer College, where he had a poetry teacher who was to inspire him to pursue his writing outside of institutions of higher learning.