I Wished by Dennis Cooper

“I started writing books about and for my friend George Miles because whenever I would speak about him honestly like I am doing now I felt a complicated agony beneath my words that talking openly can’t handle.”

For most of his life, Dennis Cooper believed the person he had loved the most and would always love above all others was George Miles. In his first novel in ten years, Dennis Cooper writes about George Miles, love, loss, addiction, suicide, and how fiction can capture these things, and how it fails to capture them.
 
Candid and powerful, I Wished is a radical work of shifting forms. It includes appearances by Santa Claus, land artist James Turrell, sentient prairie dogs, John Wayne Gacy, Nick Drake, and George, the muse for Cooper’s acclaimed novels Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period, collectively known as “The George Miles Cycle.” In revisiting the inspiration for the Cycle, Dennis has written a masterwork: the most raw, personal, and haunted book of his career.
 
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“[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