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Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries Paperback – June 29, 2010

by Dennis Cooper (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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“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.” —New York Times Book Review

“His work belongs to that of Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Charles Baudelaire, and Georges Bataille, other writers who argued with mortality.” — San Francisco Chronicle

From the internationally acclaimed author of Ugly Man and one of “the last literary outlaws in mainstream American fiction” (Bret Easton Ellis) comes a survey of his cultural criticism. From interviews with celebrities such as Leonard DiCaprio and Keanu Reeves; to obituaries for Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix; to writings on social issues—including the touchstone piece “AIDS: Words from the front”; Smothered in Hugs spans three decades of journalism from Dennis Cooper.

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  1. Print length
    400 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    June 29, 2010
  4. Dimensions
    5.31 x 1 x 8 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    0061715611
  6. ISBN-13
    978-0061715617
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Cooper delivers with the unswerving faith of someone who lives and dies by his gut reactions but also with the methodical intelligence of someone who parses those reactions so he can articulate them to the sharpest degree.” — Los Angeles Times

“Even when he steps away from the transgressive, taboo subject matter on which he made his reputation, Cooper’s outsider perspective and cold, hard, practically violent stare remains hypnotic.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“It’s a joy to watch Cooper’s mind at work.” — Time Out Chicago

“The pieces...show facets of Cooper’s particular genius you don’t see in his formally and thematically controlled fiction....More than anything, Smothered in Hugs will send you out into the world―to the bookstore, record store, art gallery, library―in search of the lost classics Cooper so excitedly introduces.” — Blackbook magazine

“The best kind of critic.” — Portland Mercury

“There’s a stainless steel sheen to Cooper’s sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion.” — Salon

From the Back Cover

Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction of one of America's greatest writers. Cooper has written on grave social issues, producing touchstone pieces for a generation of readers. His obituaries for Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, and William S. Burroughs offer portraits that are both crystallizing and appropriately indefinite. His reckonings of contemporary writers are astute and unsparing. And, of course, he serves as witness to the work and play of an illustrious roster of cultural personalities—and does so with an acuity and fairness missing from most pop culture criticism.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper Perennial; 1st edition (June 29, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0061715611
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061715617
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.7 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.31 x 1 x 8 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 17 ratings

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Dennis Cooper

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
17 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

aculeus
5.0 out of 5 stars a new narrative slay
Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2020
Verified Purchase
Cooper is always amazing. a Capricorn icon who is always thinking about things in such a refreshing way. The Courtney love chapter to the keanu reeves interview and beyond. it's amazing. It will make you love essays again.
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slowride
5.0 out of 5 stars Do buy this book
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2012
Verified Purchase
What an entertaining book, from musing about Kurt Cobain, to River Pheonix to the gay scene. Lot's of interesting stuff and Dennis Cooper is a great writer, very funny in a dry way.
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Tim Devine
4.0 out of 5 stars Smothered in Hugs - Dennis Cooper (Harper Perennial)
Reviewed in the United States on August 10, 2010
Dennis Cooper is many things - poet, essayist, critic and novelist - but through it all, he is insightful, cutting, personal and dark. As a critic for various magazines and alternative weekies, his work often mines the outer edges of popular culture, which is exactly what is collected in this new compilation from Harper Perennial, "Smothered In Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback and Obituaries."

In it, Cooper tackles such luminaries as Courtney Love, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino and others who generally operate at the intersection of pop culture and the indy underground. Unlike his few alt-culture contemporaries (from the late Lester Bangs to Chuck Klosterman) Cooper's insights, while probative and insightful, remain dry and analytical; exposing irony above humor, the essence vs. the obvious exterior. His pull-no-punches style often questions popular adulation of those who have risen to the top of the indy-culture pile (Tarantino would not be so nearly revered as a director if only he had a dozen competitors in his sub-genre) while treading a fine line between getting inside his subjects mindset without quite pissing them off. Cooper's purview runs the gamut from art to music to film and literature due to his curriculum vitae as a writer for Artforum, Spin, the LA Weekly, Interview, Village Voice and similar others.

Along this decade-plus, sometimes drug-addled journey, Cooper's work covers a wide swath of writers, actors and artists like Nan Golden, Mike Kelley, Clive Barker, Christian Bale, Pavement's Steven Malkmus, DiCaprio, Fassbinder, a hilarious interview with Japan's Ryu Murakami and others and while Cooper's interviews and critiques are always incisive, the unfortunate lateness of this publication of decades old essays makes many of them simply less relevant today. (Do we really care that there were heroin hints in MTV videos when we observe a channel that now barely even plays music videos?)

The most valuable sections may be the obituaries, (Cobain, Wm. Burroughs, River Phoenix) as they still remain both poignant and timeless today. As a compendium of 90's indy subculture, `Hugs' (named after a Guided by Voices tune) makes for an interesting time capsule, but as a reference that could live in the present, many of these stories have either evolved over time or worse, have already been throughly exhausted elsewhere.
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bitte treten sie beiseite
3.0 out of 5 stars extra für cooper fans
Reviewed in Germany on April 1, 2023
Verified Purchase
(sehr) interessant für d.c. fans, nicht unbedingt guter einstieg um zu sehn, wo seine schriftstellerischen qualitäten sind (nicht im journalistischen - aber man muss ja nicht alles können)
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