Critics' Opinion:
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Published Sep 2021
144 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
"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.
"[S]urreal and elegiac...With tones of John Rechy and André Aciman, this offers a cathartic sense of closure." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"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." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"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
This information about I Wished was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dennis Cooper is the author of the George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels: Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period. His other works include My Loose Thread; The Sluts, winner of France's Prix Sade and the Lambda Literary Award; God Jr.; Wrong; The Dream Police; Ugly Man; and The Marbled Swarm. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Paris. He is the director (with Zac Farley) of Permanent Green Light and Like Cattle Towards Glow.
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