Smothered in Hugs - by Dennis Cooper (Paperback)

About the Book

"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." --New York Times Book Review

"His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality." -- San Francisco Chronicle

"There's a stainless steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." -- Salon

From the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of "the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction" (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues--including the touchstone piece "AIDS: Words from the front"; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper.

Book Synopsis

"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." --New York Times Book Review

"His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality." -- San Francisco Chronicle

From the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of "the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction" (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues--including the touchstone piece "AIDS: Words from the front"; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper.

From the Back Cover

Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction of one of America's greatest writers. Cooper has written on grave social issues, producing touchstone pieces for a generation of readers. His obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs offer portraits that are both crystallizing and appropriately indefinite. His reckonings of contemporary writers are astute and unsparing. And, of course, he serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities--and does so with an acuity and fairness missing from most pop culture criticism.

Review Quotes

"[A] brilliant, triumphantly lurid writer as well as a supremely talented elegant stylist, whose prose is smart and nervy. He might also be the last literary outlaw in mainstream American fiction. Effortlessly entering taboo areas, he lends them a specific gravity, a justification for existing, and does so with such punk daring he makes most writers' concerns seem hopelessly middlebrow and puny by comparison." - Bret Easton Ellis
"The best kind of critic." - Portland Mercury
"Even when he steps away from the transgressive, taboo subject matter on which he made his reputation, Cooper's outsider perspective and cold, hard, practically violent stare remains hypnotic." - San Francisco Chronicle
"The pieces...show facets of Cooper's particular genius you don't see in his formally and thematically controlled fiction....More than anything, Smothered in Hugs will send you out into the world--to the bookstore, record store, art gallery, library--in search of the lost classics Cooper so excitedly introduces." - Blackbook magazine
"373 pages of an intelligent mind wrestling with American--and occasionally German and occasionally British--culture." - The Stranger magazine
"But even in these moments of intense melancholy, Ugly Man has a lightness that Cooper hasn't achieved elsewhere. Though the collection deals with topics that are shocking, even abhorrent, it is certainly this highly talented author's most accessible work to date." - Time Out New York
"Potent and humorous. . . . As always, the need for connection--even if experienced at the level of unspeakable yet intimate violence--as well as the need to expose what lies underneath are Cooper's main preoccupations." - New York Times Book Review
"There's a stainless steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." - Salon
"Cooper delivers with the unswerving faith of someone who lives and dies by his gut reactions but also with the methodical intelligence of someone who parses those reactions so he can articulate them to the sharpest degree....Smothered in Hugs has the sweetness of a time capsule buried in a schoolyard." - Los Angeles Times
"Cooper delivers with the unswerving faith of someone who lives and dies by his gut reactions but also with the methodical intelligence of someone who parses those reactions so he can articulate them to the sharpest degree." - Los Angeles Times
"It's a joy to watch Cooper's mind at work." - Time Out Chicago