Dennis Cooper

INTERVIEWS

3 AM Magazine has published two recent interviews with writer Dennis Cooper, who's often compared to Burroughs in his exploration of sex, violence and obsession. Stephen Lucas asks Cooper about his five novels published between 1989 and 1999.

3AM: Were Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period cathartic, or did they dig up more than they buried?

DC: Both, really. I started the cycle wanting to get the horror out of my mind in a reasonable way. By that I mean I wanted to understand my torment, but I also wanted to see if my thinking would make sense to other people. Just as importantly, I wanted to write novels as great as the ones I loved. On a personal level, the novel cycle is a kind of ongoing argument with myself: why should or shouldn't I do the things I fantasized about doing? I wanted to figure that out for myself, and not rely on the standard moral, religious, and legal rights and wrongs, because I don't believe in the idea of a collective truth. I'm an anarchist, by philosophy. I believe everyone has everything they need within themselves to make the right decisions. Anyway, I'm less afraid now that I'll go insane and do something fucked up to myself or to someone else, but I'm hardly free.

More recently, Dan Epstein talks to Cooper about the adolescent friendship that influenced the novels, comparisons to Burroughs and Bret Easton Ellis, why he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a "gay novelist," and opinions on various other writers and filmmakers.
3 AM Magazine (Nov-Dec 2001)

Nick Hasted talks to Dennis Cooper about responses to the rampant violence and sexual pathology in his novels.
The Guardian (Oct 2000)

Daniel Reitz talks to Dennis Cooper about his cultural roots and influences — didn't feel much affinity for hippies (though he liked the drugs and freedom), hated disco, embraced punk — and his groundbreaking series of novels.
Salon (May 2000)

Richard Goldstein looks at the work of Dennis Cooper, the most dangerous writer in America. "Cooper's cycle of five slim novels ... can be read as a single book whose subject — because it's so obsessive — seems oddly timeless. His fixation is probably what has saved him from going the way of Lydia Lunch and other denizens of the Blank Generation. That and the special language some of Cooper's champions call 'duh-speak.' This halting, haunting style allows him to convey complex ideas in a voice that breathes with adolescent angst. Cooper's writing is as close as literature gets to the vacant shimmer of alternative rock."
Village Voice (Mar 2000)

Great essay and interview by Kim Nicolini in Bad Subjects entitled Dennis Cooper's Monster In The Margins. In her preface, Nicolini notes the hostility toward Cooper in the mainstream gay community.

[Cooper] has been accused of threatening our ideas of what's acceptable in literature as he moves in and out of the literary fringes, exploring the nature of sexual obsession, alienation, violence and ultimately death. Indeed to some members of the gay community, his work seems to threaten more than traditional definitions of literature as Cooper shows the monstrous capability of sexual obsession through the minds of his homosexual male protagonists. However, what these readers fail to see is that although his work is centered on homosexual men, it transcends the constraining definitions of "sexual orientation".

Cooper takes us into the fragmented, obsessed and scattered minds of the truly sexually and psychologically alienated. His message seems to be that all people are sexually, emotionally and socially alienated at the core despite sexual orientation. Pure sexual/emotional connection between people is impossible since all a body can offer is fragmented information. Sexuality is individually and uniquely obsessive and dark, and it is only when we are free from the confines of collective identity that we can even begin to understand this. It is only when succumbing to the politicized community's definitions of sexuality, gay or otherwise, that we mask our natural "freakishness" and pretend to be "normal".

Cooper picks up this theme in the interview. "Personally, I never even really felt, like even since I decided that I was gay when I was, whatever, thirteen or something, really comfortable in the gay community. Even before liberation made everybody 'out' and more able to have conventional lives and stuff, I never liked the rituals and the collective thing. I am not into collective identity at all."
Bad Subjects (1993)

ARTICLES

Mike Wortman profiles Dennis Cooper, from his early founding of a small press and zine to his prolific poetry, short story, interview and gonzo journalism projects to his landmark series of five novels.
Disinformation (Feb 2001)

WRITINGS

The Finish Line - epistolary short story by Dennis Cooper.
Nerve

Nerve has an excerpt from Dennis Cooper's new novel, My Loose Thread. (Jun 2002)