I Wished Book

RELEASE DATE - 14 SEPTEMBER 2021

'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.

A Vogue Best Book of Fall

"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

"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

"[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