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| If you've ever trekked through one of Dennis Cooper's novels, you know that the writing is usually fascinating and the going often tough. Quick and queer - in both senses of both words - he's an undeniable talent...It's brilliant writing, casual and intense, and one hopes that Cooper will keep his prose just as lean and mean in novels to come. —Daniel Handler
Village Voice |
| 'The Ballad of Nan Goldin,' Cooper's mixed personal/critical appreciation of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (and later work), is the star of All Ears. Superbly empathetic, it's the most understanding piece I've yet to read about Goldin's amazing, much misinterpreted photography. —Jeffrey Lee
Weekly Alibi |
| Good things come to mind when Dennis Cooper's name is uttered in my presence. I can drop everything--and indeed, to many a boss' dismay, have-- to read the hot lead jumping off the press. At last, the new Dennis Cooper can be stuffed into a knapsack, read in earnest over spaghetti or Chinese, grabbed off the nightstand after a steamy winter fuck, and--not least in this sequence--placed strategically in the ready palms of a beautiful and all-too-impressionable college freshman. America 101. Here is excitement (if only vicarious), mental musculature, and satanic wit. Like an early William Burroughs novel, the Dennis Cooper book is an instant American classic. It is something to starve and steal for... Cooper's shouts, screams, and halloos tune us in to a real America, one that--like his novels and this latest book--requires a much closer reading. —Christopher Voigt
A&U | |
Dennis Cooper is the author of seven books with Grove Press: five novels (
Period,
Try,
Closer,
Guide, and
Frisk); a collection of poetry called
The Dream Police; and a collection of short stories entitled
Wrong. His most recent book is a novel called
My Loose Thread, on Canongate. Mr. Cooper is also a contributing editor at SPIN.
All Ears collects this important novelist's lesser-known work as a journalist and essayist, and several new previously unpublished pieces. As a journalist, he is solid and well-formed. He has an approachable informality, unawed by massive celebrity. His straightforward interviews with Leonardo DiCaprio, Courtney Love, Keanu Reeves, and Bob Mould disarm their subjects to find an urgent, everyday humanity. The essays on AIDS, youth culture and contemporary art treat their subjects with passion. But the obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs are as bracing as a stoic's evaluation of a dead god.
