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Dennis Cooper became famous in the 1980s for his transgressive fiction about marginalized men. A new biography makes a case for what his works can offer readers now, in our era of deep suffering and infuriating indifference.
Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper
Diarmuid Hester
The idea of a transgressive writer is a bit hard to fathom in the current moment, but that’s precisely what Dennis Cooper was. In the 1980s and ’90s, he rose to counterculture fame with his brilliant, dark novels about gay teens, gay psychopaths, gay drug addicts, and gay sex workers. This earned him comparisons to both Bret Easton Ellis and schlock horror writer Poppy Z. Brite, which indicates something of the challenge readers had categorizing his work.