Description

“[A] brilliant, triumphantly lurid writer as well as a supremely talented, elegant stylist whose prose is smart and nervy. He might also be the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.” —Bret Easton Ellis

Internationally acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper continues to study the material he's always explored honestly, but does so now—in stories—with a sense of awareness and a satirical touch that exploits and winks at his mastery of this world. As it has done for decades, Cooper’s taut, controlled prose lays bare the compulsions and troubling emptiness of the human soul.

About the Author

Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God, Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; and Ugly Man. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.

Praise For…

“Potent and humorous….As always, the need for connection—even if experienced at the level of unspeakable yet intimate violence—as well as the need to expose what lies underneath are Cooper’s main preoccupations.” — New York Times Book Review

“But even in these moments of intense melancholy, Ugly Man has a lightness that Cooper hasn’t achieved elsewhere. Though the collection deals with topics that are shocking, even abhorrent, it is certainly this highly talented author’s most accessible work to date — Time Out New York

“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.” — New York Times Book Review

“His work belongs with the likes of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“There can be no doubt about the power and originality of [Cooper’s] writing.” — Washington Post Book World

“A disquieting genius.” — Vanity Fair

“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” — William Burroughs

“I suspect history may legitimies Cooper as it has Jean Genet, Flannery O’Connor, Celine and other ‘ghoulish geniuses’.” — Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours

“Cooper is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs...An American master.” — Salon

“Cooper’s synaethetic subliminal metaphors should be outlawed, so quickly and lethally do they sink into your subconscious.” — BookForum