The Sluts - Softcover

Cooper, Dennis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786716746 ISBN 13: 9780786716746

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2005

Synopsis

"Cooper deserves reassessment . . . this compelling page-turner ought to remind adventurous readers that important transgressive literature needn't be something only the French and the occasional perverted American can get behind." -- LA Weekly

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.

About this title

About the Author

Hailed as "the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs" (Salon), Dennis Cooper is the author of The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period) that have been translated into sixteen languages. Cooper has also published a book of stories, Wrong, and several volumes of poetry, including The Dream Police. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

Starred Review. A return to form—in the sense of incorporating frank depictions of sexualized violence—Cooper's latest follows on the heels of God Jr. (Reviews, May 16), which tells the story of a marriage's disintegration in the wake of an adolescent boy's death. This book, too, features a dead boy—or at least the fantasy of one. The title men are denizens of a Web chat site that reviews the performance of hustlers such as Brad, a blond who looks like an angelic teen but is probably older, and who may or may not have been killed, or snuffed, by a john. Time wobbles in the book. Brad's passivity drives a certain type of dominant to distraction, and Brad gets rave after rave review, rendered by Cooper with deadpan perfection. But as Brad peaks and then begins to decline, Cooper pieces together his Portland, Ore., backstory, and hardcore s&m moves to blood and mutilation. Brad is eventually pimped out by a man named Brian for "the ultimate" with a Web regular who may be a serial killer—one who first comes to an agreement with his victims on a price for killing them. The eerie matter-of-factness with which all of this is discussed is what makes this neo-epistolary novel fascinating, and certainly the best extant work on extreme queer s&m Internet culture in any genre. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0786716746
• ISBN 13: 9780786716746
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304