"The most dangerous writer in America" (according to The Village Voice) is back with the funniest book he's ever written: "Ugly Man".
Internationally acclaimed writer Dennis Cooper continues to study the dark material he's always explored 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. In "Ugly Man," as he has done for decades, Cooper lays bare the compulsions and troubling emptiness of the human soul in taut, gleaming prose.
The cult novelist's collection of short stories plumbs veins of dark humor amid the sex and gore his fans have come to expect. The contents range from: The Fifteen Worst Russian Gay Porn Web Sites and an abortive episode entitled One Night in 1979 I Did Too Much Coke and Couldn't Sleep and Had What I Thought Was a Million-Dollar Idea to Write the Definitive Tell-all Book About Glam Rock Based on My Own Personal Experience but This Is as Far as I Got—to longer pieces in which sadistic male characters explore their preoccupations with the murder, mutilation and rape of nihilistic teenaged boys. Stories of the latter group often feature text pared down to dialogue alone or resembling scripts complete with stage directions. The lighter fare, such as it is, provides much needed comic relief, as in the case of The Anal-Retentive Line Editor, which proceeds through interstitial edits upon a series of drafts of a piece of gay erotica, forming a running conversation and problematic seduction between author and editor. If you're a Dennis Cooper fan, none of this is shocking; if you're not, this might not be the best place to start.
