Dennis Cooper

Five novels written between 1989 and 2000, grouped as the George Miles Cycle, circle the same figure: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period. George Miles was a friend Dennis Cooper met in southern California when both were young, and he died in 1987 at the age of thirty. I Wished, issued by Soho Press in 2021 and Cooper's first novel in a decade, drops the fictional cover and speaks to Miles directly, letting grief share the page with Santa Claus, the land artist James Turrell and the singer Nick Drake. Cooper, born in Pasadena in 1953, founded the magazine Little Caesar in 1976 and a press under the same name two years later. From 2002 he kept a daily literary blog, which Google deleted along with his email account in June 2016; a petition gathered thousands of signatures and the material was handed back that August. He lives in Paris, and his fiction has long divided readers.