Publishers Weekly
★ 07/26/2021
In Cooper’s surreal and elegiac conclusion to the George Miles Cycle (after Period), a writer named Dennis Cooper continues to recount his obsessive love for a friend from adolescence. Cooper declares a mission to convey a sense of George to those who “don’t give a shit about some weird cult writer’s books.” To get there, he tells his own story. At 10, Cooper’s skull was accidentally split by a rusty axe in an event that “subdivided” his consciousness, planting the seeds for his life as a writer. At 15, he meets 12-year-old George at an all-boys high school dance and talks him down from an acid trip. George wants a gun for Christmas, and Cooper imagines himself as Santa Claus, giving him a pistol and watching George shoot himself. Cooper also fantasizes about John Wayne Gacy’s final victim, Robert Piest, because Piest reminds him of George. The passage is one of many boldly transgressive and strangely successful moves in the fractured narrative. Nick Drake’s dark lyrics are a constant, eerie soundtrack to the boys’ young lives, summed up in one of Cooper’s trademark elliptical bon mots (“Nick Drake’s songs are like a pack of dolphins signaling his solitude incoherently to George and other introverted messes”). With tones of John Rechy and André Aciman, this offers a cathartic sense of closure. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Praise for I Wished
The Guardian Best Books of 2021
A Bookforum Best Book of 2021
A Vogue Best Book of Fall
One of Lithub's "22 Novels You Need to Read this Fall"
“Intricate, funny, destabilizing and totally unforeseen.”
—Rachel Kushner
“May just be his most surreal, disturbing, vulnerable work yet (which is saying a lot).”
—Vogue
“Whatever Cooper represents in the landscape of contemporary literature, he’s without a doubt one of the most vital and important writers to emerge in the past 50 years, and his genius goes far beyond mere taboo-breaking (although it’s very difficult to read one of his deadpan, hardcore novels and not walk away a few degrees less innocent than you were on page one). Cooper’s books are dissection tables of desire; they take a bone saw to the dreams, sexual fantasies, obsessions, youthful delusions, and myths of fame and individuality that have come to define our private and public selves.”
—Interview Magazine
“The George Miles Cycle novels feature a mosaic of broken characters engaging in drug abuse, adolescent sex, and violent exploitation. Fearlessly honest and unconventional, the series is considered a landmark of experimental fiction and has accrued both acclaim and moralistic scorn. Though technically not a new installment, I Wished excavates the cycle’s source material while paying tribute to its subversive ethos.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“I Wished is not an easy book by any means, but is in some way a balm to those who also carry the weight of loss, the acknowledgement of how heavy it can be, and how it is also proof of having lived and loved. It is a book about what to do with that weight, how to carry it, how to honor it.”
—Lithub
“His most explicit elegy . . . One of the epic love stories of 20th-century letters.”
—The Nation
“[I Wished] reads like a kaleidoscopic fever dream . . . Throughout its splintered storylines, Cooper touches on the concept of the unknowable, mourning, and the innate failure of language.”
—them.
“There are few writers like Dennis Cooper.”
—AnOther Magazine
“I Wished is a marvel of both economy and excess, a haunted theme park built on the fairgrounds of its author’s throbbing heart.”
—Justin Taylor, Bookforum
“A literary homage to his friend and lover, Cooper fans and followers will revel in the depth, despair, and cathartic release this elegiac book strives for and unforgettably achieves in spades.”
—The Bay Area Reporter
“Revisits the story of the great love of Cooper’s life . . . I Wished distinguishes itself for its vulnerability and reflection.”
—Alta
“A deep, troubling, yet ultimately beautiful meditation on loss, art, love, and motivation.”
—Southwest Review
“To reduce I Wished to a memoir about loss, trauma, and grief would be an unforgivable crime against literature. While the inspiration for the book comes from a place of loss and trauma, it is an astonishing work of art that poses the unsettling but necessary question of whether it is truly possible to write about loss and do it justice.”
—queerguru
“A poignant and haunting elegy to a figure that has loomed large in Cooper's imagination since dying by suicide at age 30. The phantasmagorical qualities make every page a thrilling revelation, even for readers unfamiliar with the George Miles cycle of books. It is a beautiful, maddening riddle about love and what is set adrift in its wake . . . A disquieting and magnetic feat of fiction.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Surreal and elegiac.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability . . . Cooper’s urgency to relate his friend’s story is felt in every word, image, and narrative move; even the most oddball structural decisions possess tremendous power.”
—Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Praise for Dennis Cooper
“[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.”
—Bret Easton Ellis
“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 . . . This is high-risk literature.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“His work belongs with the likes of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Cooper is a profoundly original American visionary, and the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs . . . An American master.”
—Salon
“Cooper’s synaesthetic subliminal metaphors should be outlawed, so quickly and lethally do they sink into your subconscious.”
—BookForum
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2021-07-14
An elegy for a friend, lover, and muse that resists conventions of storytelling and expands the possibilities of the novel form with daring and vulnerability.
With his five-part George Miles cycle—beginning with Closer (1989)—Cooper made his name as a Sadean enfant terrible, never shying away from depicting graphic scenes of sex and violence while capturing readers with hypnotic narrative authority. This group of novels, we learn in the opening pages of his latest, was not only an homage to his beloved friend—whose suicide at 30 the writer did not learn about until a decade later—but his only way of articulating a pain “that talking openly can’t handle.” Less narrative than prismatic, this book explores imagined landscapes, George’s childhood, and the depths of Cooper's own psyche to ask: How does the artist alchemize his grief into a work that is legible and worthy of attention? In the first major section, a narrator explores George’s traumatic upbringing by a sexually abusive father and his mental health as he transitions into adulthood while living with untreated bipolar disorder. Here, Cooper refers to himself in the third person, too, as if to examine the conditions for George’s suicide through an objective eye. Other sections examine George and the author’s relationship to him by way of wry humor and playful storytelling. In one section, a secular Santa Claus—described as “a kind of genius, [who] needs to love someone who’s very complicated"—chooses George as his favorite yet agonizes over what kind of gift to offer him. Another section bends and twists the fairy-tale form to depict a fictional encounter between George and artist James Turrell’s Roden Crater. Though the book’s emotional register can seem, at times, to be stuck in a rut of despair, its fragmentary structure allows for a range of emotional valences, ranging between grief and celebration, anger and love. Cooper’s urgency to relate his friend’s story is felt in every word, image, and narrative move; even the most oddball structural decisions possess tremendous power.
Spare but powerfully wrought, this is a book that pushes the novel’s capacity to capture grief, love, and truth.
