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“The last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction.”—Bret Easton Ellis
Winner of the Ferro–Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
From “the most dangerous writer in America” (Village Voice), Dennis Cooper’s Closer is the controversial first novel in the award-winning George Miles Cycle—a haunting exploration of 1980s middle America, alienation, and the very limits of experience, now featuring an introduction by cultural critic Lynne Tillman
Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles becomes the object of his fellow students’ passions. One after another, his teenage friends rifle through George, ransacking him for love, secrets, or anything else they can plausibly extract.
Closer follows the subterranean connections that drag George into the arms of men like John, an artist who drains his portraits of humanity in order to find what lies beneath; Alex, fascinated by splatter films and pornography; and Steve, an underground entrepreneur who turns his parents garage into a nightclub. Boys and men pass George from hand to hand, fascinated by the nightmarish intensity of his detachment, but soon he will be confronted by desires he may find harder to endure.
An unflinching dissection of the horrors of middle America, Closer lays bare a world where pain is an undeniable reality, the inevitable companion of truth, and a test of our commitment to life. Nearly four decades since its original publication, Dennis Cooper’s brutally frank and provocative cult classic remains unmatched, continuing to push the limits of our minds and sharpen our understanding of the life around us.
Praise for Dennis Cooper:
“Extraordinary . . . One of the few new American writers with a completely distinctive voice.”—Edmund White, on Closer
“A story about how desire can persist to the brink of self-destruction and beyond. . . . A work of considerable courage.”—Thomas R. Edwards, New York Review of Books on Closer
“Bleak and brilliant. There can be no doubt about the power and originality of Cooper’s writing. Sheer force of style raises Closer to the level of (at least) a minor classic.”—John Ash, Washington Post Book World on Closer
“Closer translates the moments and feelings for which we don’t really have a vocabulary. Cooper taps the ineffable, the murky underside of sexual and human relationships.”—Lynne Tillman on Closer
“An incredibly beautiful and daring book. Cooper’s language is at first intense, nearly minimal, then suddenly, it ascends into vision.”—Kathy Acker on Closer
“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe.”—Catherine Texier, New York Times Book Review
“Lean, mean, lethal. . . There’s a stainless steel sheen to Cooper’s sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion….He is one of the few serious writers working in the literary tradition of subversion.”—Salon
“Like the Velvet Underground’s first album…Dennis Cooper’s writings have a powerful cult influence.”—Irvine Welsh
“One of the few cutting edge artists today still, thankfully, persevering with that beautiful and challenging medium of the novel.”—Dazed and Confused
“The stories in Wrong question the morality of violent sexuality even as they acknowledge and sometimes revel in its allure. There is a frosty elegance to the writing, but, more importantly, there is an integrity that makes a reader believe it is worthwhile to look as unflinchingly as the author at such desperate lives.”—Mirabella
“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer.”—William S. Burroughs
“Cooper has given a voice to an emptiness we can barely stand to think about. . . . He dallies with the workings of narration and, in doing so, with the meaning of self. His work belongs with that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Chilling . . . relentless . . . unequivocally concerned with what happens after you’ve ‘stopped feeling anything,’ what remains on the other side of excess, the emptiness that needs to be filled.”—The Nation
“Nobody since Jean Genet has written with such lucid brutality.”—Mother Jones
“There can be no doubt about the power and originality of [Cooper’s] writing.” —Washington Post
Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle of five novels, of which Closer is the first. He is also the author of My Loose Thread, The Sluts, God Jr., and The Marbled Swarm. Cooper’s other works include story collections, poetry, and the essay collection Smothered in Hugs. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris.