SOURCE: Cooper, Dennis, and Jonathan Bing. “Dennis Cooper: Adolescent Rebellion Propels His Dystopian Vision.” Publishers Weekly (21 March 1994): 48-9.

In the following interview, Bing provides an overview of Cooper's life, literary career, and thematic concerns and relays comments from Cooper regarding his work and critical reception.

In the tradition of the best grass-roots art, Dennis Cooper has been publishing his poetry and fiction at the margins of the cultural marketplace, in fanzines, chapbooks and obscure literary journals, since graduating from high school in the early 1970s. Yet many of Cooper's readers only know of his most recent work, a series of slim and startling books from Grove Press—the novels, Closer and Frisk, and the short-story collection Wrong—each an ice-cold glimpse of gay teenaged sexual turmoil, drug abuse and obsessive violence rendered in his signature spare and meticulous narrative style.

At once clinical and creepily meditative, Cooper's fiction...