Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed

or you are the only animal

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm very

happy and lucky to have on the show Dennis Cooper, whose newest book of stories is called

Ugly Man.

It's published in a paperback original edition by Harper Perennial.

This is one of Dennis's rare visits from Paris, where he is now living,

or at least too rare visits from Paris.

And it's, to my mind a very interesting book in that all of the

things that once stopped people short about your writing.

Its violence, its ease with extreme forms of sexuality,

its narrative invention verging on the creation of a labyrinth without walls,

somehow or other in all these pieces.

No sooner do you respond one way

than there's like a shock or a short circuit

and something humorous will come up and although you may start to laugh, that doesn't

become a dominant tone either. Almost as if the style is about constantly pulling the rug out from

under itself and under the reader.

That's my intention.

...