Period

Dennis Cooper is an incredible writer who dares to go places very few other authors refuse to touch. His books are shocking, grotesque but also masterfully structured, beautifully written and seem even more vital than ever in 2020. If you can stomach the extreme depictions of sexual violence you’ll find an incredible and indelible voice you’ll never forget.

Jacket was slightly dirty, spine is a bit crushed, but pages are completely intact and clean.

This book was awful. The story line was hard to follow, and the book didn't make sense at all, a waist of money.

Its significance becomes more startlingly apparent at its end. If you've never read Dennis Cooper, then I wouldn't suggest beginning with PERIOD. The culmination of Cooper's five-book series, 'The George Miles Cycle,' PERIOD is a difficult text -- difficult to read, to understand, and to put down when you realize it's already over. My introduction to it was gentle; I'd been eased in by books one through four, as well as a couple of Cooper's outliers (THE SLUTS, MY LOOSE THREAD). As with most of Cooper's books, plot is not as essential as the language and thematic elements, but neither are overlooked or parceled for easy consumption. Those who write off PERIOD as meaningless have not hacked deep enough into its layers -- beneath the epidermis of taut, yet authentic, language; through characters desperate, manipulative, hungry for worlds within and beyond their reach, electronic and tangible, down to the subcutaneous fat. Give PERIOD a chance, when you're ready, and read it more than once. It's the perfect ending to Cooper's so-called 'cycle of sex and death' and a revelatory beginning to a new mode of reading, and writing, fiction.

Few novelists pursue their chosen themes with such morbid enthusiasm as Dennis Cooper. For more than a decade his quintet of novels - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and now Period - have obsessed over sex, child pornography, drugs and dismemberment. Undeterred even by death threats, Cooper has played out his violent fantasies in these novels with a disturbing purity of vision. His new novel Period marks, as its title suggests, the end of the cycle. He's claimed that it's both a `disappearing act' and a `suicide note.' Considering the spectral and sparse quality of the book both comments seem particularly appropriate.The quintet began back in 1989 with Closer. Yet it was Cooper's 1991 novel Frisk that really stirred controversy, deliberately blurring the line between fantasy and reality and securing its author a place at the cutting edge of contemporary American literature. Period draws out the same themes and concerns as the preceding novels, charting the bored angst of gay West Coast adolescents and their middle-aged paramours as they drift into experiments with drugs, Satanism, sex and ultimately murder. Like grim parodies of Enlightenment anatomists, Cooper's protagonists believe that dismembering the bodies of their lovers will reveal the truth of existence, bringing them closer to an absent God and saving them from the demystified consumer culture that surrounds them.What has always been so impressive about Cooper's work is his dedication to narrative forms that replicate the violent content of the books. His prose has sought to cut into the flat surface of the conventional pornographic or horror text through the use of flashbacks, narratives-within-narratives, and stream of consciousness techniques. In Period this relationship between form and content reaches its peak, creating a fragmented and confusing novel that refuses easy definition. It's certainly the sparsest of Cooper's books, a skeleton thin, episodic narrative that's like the decomposed body of one of the story's victims. Indeed, the novel is so cut up that the reader has no choice but to follow the advice of the epigraph and `keep watch over absent meaning'. Shifting between different characters' viewpoints, radio phone-ins, Internet chat rooms and diaries Cooper creates a disturbing hall of mirrors through which we're left to wander without a guide. Although Period's obliqueness is slightly dissatisfying it appears ultimately inevitable, for what else but a self-reflexive `period' could end this set of books?Period confirms Cooper's growing reputation as the most exciting and transgressive of contemporary American novelists. However, as last year's publication of Cooper's journalism and essays - in the collection All Ears - has demonstrated, his work has much more scope than this obsessively brilliant cycle of novels. He's currently working on a book based upon the recent spate of American High School shootings and has also expressed a desire to experiment with a novel of physical comedy (he cites the films of Jacques Tatti, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Chan as a potential source of inspiration). Whatever path he may choose his next offering will be awaited eagerly on both sides of the Atlantic.

This was my first Dennis Cooper book. I have since read all of his books. And I must say that none of them can ever hold up to this, my first experience. All of his books are terrific, especially Try and Guide. But the atmosphere that Cooper has been building on, for years, culminated in this apex which was at once sharp with everything Dennis' literature reveled in and completely ambiguous as if a cloud had descended over him and us in a blanket of glossy melancholia. This book is brimming with classic modern approaches towards writing but it gives them a new birth, the freshness of the prose is terrific. Cooper seems to have completely detached himself from the rest of the literary world and whereas in his earlier novels he slid through pop cultural references, he has abandoned his postmodernity for something purely modern and abstract. This work reads like the classics of high modernist fiction with the subtlest references to popular culture. It's basically a long fragmented dialogue, poem, list. Satanism and death metal abound, but whereas old-Cooper would have cheekily referenced an actual band or made up alternative names for people who obviously stood for public personas (i.e. guide) he creates these blurry characters who simultaneously mimic the very void they inhabit. These people can be anyone and they absorb whatever you project onto them, the only thing that remains constant is their glowingly gloomy environs. This is a very fragmented read, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has no appreciation for modernist literature or no patience for it, as it would come across as a pretentious and indulgent artifact. But if one has the time to digest something as subtle as this progressive writing, one can be greatly rewarded. The violence and sexuality in this novel doesn't compare to anything else by Cooper. Many people are drawn to Cooper's literature simply because of that violence and sexuality. But this novels lack of this is completely understandable considering the nature of this vague little book, the amount of detail needed for such grotesqueries would be completely inappropriate for the style in which Cooper brilliantly channels. I read this in one night, and the feeling that Cooper created honestly seeped out of the book. I could feel the isolation of the place he had created. I distinctly remember sitting in my bed and remembering those characters and the place that they lived, which seemed to be any town and unlike any town or not even a town at all but a specific locale of the psyche, airy, uncharted, and very sad. Cooper has revealed the very depths of his being in this book, and it's the saddest and most mysterious place I have ever glimpsed. Cooper is honestly the most progressive writer that I know of, he deals with the same subjects that many progressive writers dwell upon but he steps it up a notch stylistically with his absolutely genius way with words and thoughts. This book is very important to me.