Ugly Man

Dennis Cooper

HarperCollins, Publishers

Anal-retentive Line Editor

Tom Friedman is an unusual young American sculptor who produces quirky yet beautiful sculptures out of household objects – pencils, plastic cups, laundry detergent, paper straws. Featured in cream and in a one-person presentation at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Friedman has quickly gained an impressive following of some of the most attentive and influential contemporary art-watchers in the United States. This is art which raises questions about the making and seeing of art, about the pleasures of small transformations producing sudden beauty. This book will coincide with Friedman's first major American museum tour, to be held in 2000–2002. American art critic Bruce Hainley examines the artist's work as a kind of giant self-portrait. Poet and novelist Dennis Cooper discusses with the artist such unexpected influences as contemporary electronic music. Guardian art critic Adrian Searle looks at the artist's work Untitled, 1993 – a ring of plastic cups in a home-made Minimalist tradition. The Artist's Choices are The Dinner Party (1919) by Swiss writer Robert Walser, and the glossary to Info-Psychology (1975–76) by Timothy Leary, the cult psychologist who advocated the use of psychedelic drugs. Facsimiles of the artist's notebooks and text works are published alongside an important interview by curator Robert Storr.

Tom Friedman (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

Arts & Photography

Adrian Searle

Bruce Hainley

Individual Artists

Phaidon Press

A collection of short stories that use death to probe the meaning in life introduces a man who abducts, molests, and murders young boys and a teenage rock band called Horror Hospital, among other grotesques.

Wrong Loth

Literature & Fiction

Contemporary

Grove Weidenfeld

Kathy Acker pushed literary boundaries with a vigor and creative fire that made her one of America's preeminent experimental writers and her books cult classics. Now Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper have distilled the incredible variety of Acker's body of work into a single volume that reads like a communique from the front lines of late-twentieth-century America. Acker was a literary pirate whose prodigious output drew promiscuously from popular culture, the classics of Western civilization, current events, and the raw material of her own life. Her vision questions everything we take for granted -- the authority of parents, government, and the law; sexuality and the policing of desire -- and puts in its place a universe of polymorphous perversity and shameless, playful freakery. Spanning Acker's '70s punk interventions through more than a dozen major novels, Essential Acker is an indispensable overview of the work of this distinctive American writer and a reminder of her challenge to and influence on writers of the future. "Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know." -- Tom LeClair, The New York Times Book Review

Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker (Acker, Kathy)

JEANETTE WINTERSON

Kathy Acker

Amy Scholder

United States

GROVE PRESS

Charles Ray chronicles the California artist s early sculptural work from 1986 through 1990. Along with images of many of the Ray s important pieces from the period are two interviews conducted by the curators of the exhibit with the artist. The humor and quirkiness Ray brings to his art has made him an influential force in today s contemporary art world. Published in 1990 by The Newport Harbor Art Museum. Now called the Orange County Museum of Art.

Charles Ray: Interviews by Lucinda Barnes and Dennis Cooper (an exhibition catalogue)

Charles., Ray

Lucinda Barnes

Newport Harbor Art Museum

Against Nature : A Group Show of Work by Homosexual Men

Richard Hawkins

Los Angeles Contemporary

Written between 1994 and 2002, The Sluts is a black sheep cousin to Dennis Cooper's internationally acclaimed George Miles Cycle. Set largely on the pages of a website where gay male escorts are reviewed by their clients, and told through the postings, emails, and conversations of several dozen unreliable narrators, The Sluts chronicles the evolution of one young escort's date with a satisfied client into a metafiction of pornography, lies, half-truths, and myth. Explicit, shocking, comical, and displaying the author's signature flair for blending structural complexity with direct, stylish, accessible language, The Sluts is Cooper's most transgressive novel since Frisk, and one of his most innovative works of fiction to date.

The Sluts

Void Books

A short story from the collection Ugly Man by Dennis Cooper.

Ugly Man: Stories

Harper-perennial

Closer

Serpent's Tail

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Dennis Cooper. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Dennis Cooper