Closer: (Serpent's Tail Classics)

With an introduction by Lynne Tillman 'The last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction' Bret Easton Ellis Physically beautiful and strangely passive, George Miles attracts his fellow students' attention, like a wallet lying on the street. 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. Closer is an unflinching exploration of the very limits of experience. Still shocking after more than two decades, here is a provocative classic that assaults the senses as it engages the mind.

About the Author :
Dennis Cooper is a novelist, poet, critic and performance artist. His work has inspired numerous bands including Deerhunter and his work has been translated into seventeen languages. Cooper has been the subject of the biography Wrong by Diarmuid Hester and now lives in Paris.

Review :
Extraordinary. . . . One of the few new American writers with a completely distinctive voice A story about how desire can persist to the brink of self-destruction and beyond. . . . A work of considerable courage 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 relations An incredibly beautiful and daring book Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer Without a doubt one of the most vital and important writers to emerge in the past fifty years, and his genius goes far beyond mere taboo-breaking . . . 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' Interview A master of transgressive literature featuring all manner of minutely observed depravity . . . each novel is a brilliantly crafted piece of transgressive literature His work belongs with the likes of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality. Cooper is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs . . . An American master My generation is very much marked by Dennis Cooper's George Miles cycle: in the 1990s, everyone read these books; I was awed by them A queer cult writer ... Cooper is unflinching in his exploration of the seedy depths of underground American queer life