My Loose Thread
Dennis Cooper
Available as Paperback
Larry is a teenager wrestling not only with his sexuality and the implications of a physical relationship with his younger brother, but with the very point of his existence. He is numb to almost all that surrounds him.
As the book opens, Larry has been paid $500 by a senior to kill a fellow pupil and retrieve the boy’s notebook. It seems simple enough. However, once Larry delves into the notebook, complications arise.
An immensely powerful work that explores teenage depression, moral vacuity and the confusion of love, My Loose Thread is a claustrophobic and harrowing piece of fiction.
“It’s almost more like music than reading, a prose that is not in any way poetic, but operates to a unique rhythm… Cooper packs more into his pages than almost anyone.”
Toby Litt
independent On Sunday
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“America’s most daring novelist.”
the Face
“Cooper’s brilliance as a writer is in somehow making the inarticulate so damn articulate. Moving and shocking, elegiac and disturbing, very funny and very sad.”
Tim Teeman
the Times
“The prose acts like small hammer blows against the skull. Buy its blood-soaked end, the book seems a miracle of empathy, leaving you slightly nauseous but very clear.”
time Out
Dennis Cooper
DENNIS COOPER is the author of All Ears, Criticism, Essays and Obituaries; a short story collection, Wrong; and several volumes of poetry. He’s best known, however, for his recently completed cycle of five novels - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and Period, all published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail.