Dennis Cooper at his apartment in Paris.
Dennis Cooper and Richard Hawkins
on Books, Naked Bodies, and OnlyFans
In the puritanism of American fiction (with its endless moral posturing, constant need for redemption narratives, and characters that seem required by law to learn valuable life lessons by the end of their run), Dennis Cooper stands like a pagan god—wild, fearsome, fulsome, something to worship and tremble in front of, and maybe even to feed a little blood. Or perhaps Cooper is more like the bookstore bogeyman waiting for you down at the end of the isles of flowery fiction, ready to swallow you whole. Or maybe he’s just a different kind of literary mystic. Whatever Cooper represents in the landscape of contemporary literature, he’s without a doubt one of the most vital and important writers to emerge in the past 50 years, and his genius goes far beyond mere taboo-breaking (although it’s very difficult to read one of his deadpan, hardcore novels and not walk away a few degrees less innocent than you were on page one). Cooper’s books are dissection tables of desire; they take a bone saw to the dreams, sexual fantasies, obsessions, youthful delusions, and myths of fame and individuality that have come to define our private and public selves.