In the following review, Ash acknowledges the pornographic and violent passages in Closer, but asserts that the work retains powerful and original writing.
Although I'm sure he'd crin...
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In the following review, Laurence offers a positive assessment of Try.
The writer Robert Hardin has noted “Dennis Cooper will be remembered as the most prophetic writer of his time.” ...
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In the following review, Cunningham offers a positive evaluation of Try.
If Jean Genet and Paul Bowles could have had a child together, he might have grown up to be a writer like Dennis Cooper. I&#...
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In the following review, Limsky judges Try as overly self-conscious and redundant.
It's not easy to care about a cast of characters composed of junkies, pedophiles and necrophiliacs, and who...
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In the following review, Mannes-Abbott offers a positive assessment of Try.
Dennis Cooper's urgent and uncompromising fiction reduces the critical mainstream to bemusement, and draws polemic...
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In the following essay, Jackson studies the interrelationship of sex and death in Cooper's fiction and the author's explorations of the limits of self-knowledge and metaphysical longing,...
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In the following interview, Cooper discusses the development of his thematic concerns and stylistic approach, his literary influences, the significance of representative characters in his fiction, and...
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In the following excerpt, Gardner provides a negative review of Try.
Thirty years ago the art of fiction began to undergo a change similar to one that had already befallen the theatrical arts. Thou...
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In the following review, Indiana offers a positive evaluation of Guide.
Since his writing first appeared in chapbooks in the late '70s, Dennis Cooper has been a uniquely disturbing presence ...
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In the following review, Hainley offers a positive assessment of Guide.
This is the problem: how to convey the realness of the world, of the guy so beautiful he “white[s] out” vision,...
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In the following review, Roberson comments on the metafictional aspects of Guide.
In Guide, the fourth book of his five-novel cycle, Dennis Cooper charts passage between a variety of seeming opposi...
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In the following review, Edwards presents a favorable review of Closer.
Dennis Cooper's Closer shows young lives not beginning but on the verge of ending in California, here conceived as &#x...
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In the following review, Beckett provides a favorable assessment of Guide, but expresses reservations over Cooper's indefinite morality.
Reading Dennis Cooper can make you queasy. This short...
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In the following review, Ford comments on Cooper's blurring of the lines between fiction and reality as expressed in his novel Period.
Sometimes it's difficult to tell if an artist&#x...
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In the following breif review, Howard offers the opinion that Period is a “deeper and darker” work than its predecessors, and that the book contains a complex structure and extensive vis...
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In the following review, Hitchings alleges that Period fails to take a clear stand, and that Cooper's intentions are obscure and “illegible.”
For twenty years, Dennis Cooper cu...
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In the following review, Young discusses Cooper's series of five novels, offering a positive evaluation of Period. Young acknowledges the base and sordid elements, but lauds the “grace a...
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In the following excerpt, McCarron examines Cooper's depiction of existential angst, irreligion, and the impossibility of transcendence in his short fiction and series of novels, offering compa...
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In the following review, Silverblatt offers a positive assessment of Frisk.
To frisk is to “search a person for something concealed, especially a weapon,” Frisk is about a man who wan...
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In the following review, Kaufman provides a generally favorable review of Frisk, finding both merit and dissatisfaction in the novel's experimental approach.
The very ambition to categorize ...
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In the following review, Byrne discusses the perverse themes and obsessions in Frisk.
“When Dennis is thirteen, he sees a series of photographs of a boy apparently unimaginably mutilated. De...
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In the following review, Van Leer discusses the problematic categorization of gay literature and offers a tempered review of Discontents, which he praises for its subversive angle but criticizes for i...
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In the following interview, Bing provides an overview of Cooper's life, literary career, and thematic concerns and relays comments from Cooper regarding his work and critical reception.
In t...
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In the following essay, Viegener examines the American fascination with psychosexual murderers and the portrayal of homosexuals as calculating, deviant criminals, drawing attention to Frisk and Jerk f...
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In the following review, the critic discusses Cooper's portrayal of the emotionally bereft in Wrong and Closer.
Talking of recent fiction, the narrator of one of Dennis Cooper's short...
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The Transom was, of course, entranced by today's JT Leroy semi-expose in New York magazine, even though Serena Torrey, the icy blonde vixen PR woman at New York magazine wouldn't send over advance ...
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Critical Review by John Ash
JT Leroy and his Literary Sex Slaves
