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Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground
This anthology brings to light some of the new fiction writers who are using the Internet’s labyrinthine array of blogs and personal web pages to expose, test, and develop their work. They are gay, straight, young, old, and in some cases still searching for their identities.
Written by Dennis Cooper
Written by Dennis Cooper
362 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
3 people are currently reading
159 people want to read
About the author
Dennis Cooper
109 books1,791 followersDennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953. He grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
He wrote stories and poems from early age but got serious about writing at 15 after reading Arthur Rimbaud and The Marquis de Sade. He attended LA county public schools until the 8th grade when he transferred to a private school, Flintridge Preparatory School for Boys in La Canada, California, from which he was expelled in the 11th grade.
While at Flintridge, he met his friend George Miles, who would become his muse and the subject of much of his future writing. He attended Pasadena City College for two years, attending poetry writing workshops taught by the poets Ronald Koertge and Jerene Hewitt. He then attended one year of university at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, where he studied with the poet Bert Meyers.
In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. From 1980 to 1983 he was Director of Programming for the Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, California. From 1983 to 1985, he lived in New York City.
In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and Period.
His post-George Miles Cycle novels include My Loose Thread, The Sluts and God, Jr.
Other works include the short-story collections Wrong and Ugly Man, poetry collections The Dream Police and The Weaklings, as well as the recent Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries.
Dennis Cooper currently spends his time between Los Angeles and Paris.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 21, 2020
This contemporary collection of new transgressive writers is edited by Dennis Cooper, the edgiest queer writer ever, and that is saying something. This book really inspires me and keeps me focused as a queer writer and reader. I also have actor and poet and performance artist as a part of my trick bag, just like the Editor of this volume. Sex, drugs, drink, crime; you name it, its in here. Did Elijah Wood's character from the film Day Zero have his storyline lifted from this tome? Mr Cooper did have a fight with Google after all.
February 5, 2012
If you think the adjectives gentrified, conservative, and economics-driven describe Dennis Cooper, writer and editor of the 2007 anthology of blogging fiction Userlands, or any of his books, you are dead wrong. Or, you have him confused with someone else, maybe that Bradley Cooper of the silver screen. But if you agree with him that those words characterize most contemporary American fiction, then this anthology may just be your tumbler of mescaline.
Fresh, innovative, frequently dark, and sometimes shocking (depending on your particular shockability), the adventurous fictions in this collection counterpoint the groomed, mannered, and well-heeled stories typically published in places like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Imagine, for instance, the first line from Garrison Taylor’s “Fantastic, Made of Plastic” appearing downwind of ‘Talk of the Town’: “Kate blows her boyfriend with the hope he’ll stop crying”
...or the stunning opening from Nicholas Messig’s “You’re in My Blood Now”: “I miss your blue hair, plastic penis wrapped up like a baby.”
Honey, we’re not in the Hamptons anymore.
Which is a good thing. Such daring is a needed jolt to the murmuring EKGs of much mainstream fiction. But to say the only worth these fictions hold is shock value is to read them cursorily, to miss the bleeding point. There is also bold experimentation on display here, both innovation and playfulness that question the conventions of contemporary writing while calling attention to the web as a domain for creativity. (See, for instance, Jack Shamama’s “Spatial Devices Can Take Any Form: #2 in the Unproduceable Porn Script Series.”)
Such genre boundary-bending also serves as a good home for the identity exploration frequently bared here, as in my favorite piece in the anthology, Bett Williams’ “Crossroad Blues”:
Fresh, innovative, frequently dark, and sometimes shocking (depending on your particular shockability), the adventurous fictions in this collection counterpoint the groomed, mannered, and well-heeled stories typically published in places like The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Imagine, for instance, the first line from Garrison Taylor’s “Fantastic, Made of Plastic” appearing downwind of ‘Talk of the Town’: “Kate blows her boyfriend with the hope he’ll stop crying”
...or the stunning opening from Nicholas Messig’s “You’re in My Blood Now”: “I miss your blue hair, plastic penis wrapped up like a baby.”
Honey, we’re not in the Hamptons anymore.
Which is a good thing. Such daring is a needed jolt to the murmuring EKGs of much mainstream fiction. But to say the only worth these fictions hold is shock value is to read them cursorily, to miss the bleeding point. There is also bold experimentation on display here, both innovation and playfulness that question the conventions of contemporary writing while calling attention to the web as a domain for creativity. (See, for instance, Jack Shamama’s “Spatial Devices Can Take Any Form: #2 in the Unproduceable Porn Script Series.”)
Such genre boundary-bending also serves as a good home for the identity exploration frequently bared here, as in my favorite piece in the anthology, Bett Williams’ “Crossroad Blues”:
“But I am a man too, sort of, so I met him back with my handy distorted guitar sound. I engaged my fragments, my other floating bodies, pulled them down like puppet balloons on a string, my family of twisted genders ready for the show. We both had to do a bit of work, but there we were. I softened my eyes. That was how my real man came out anyway. Vulnerability is an old trick.”Maybe not all the fictions in this collection match Williams’ quality—unevenness runs through and throughout much of the work—but quality is the wrong compass for navigating this landscape of alternative fiction. For quality is an external measurement, and these writers, loosely-bound in this volume, are clearly seeing from within. There is light in their words, energy. And if they aspire, it is to the forceful expression of personal truths, as Cooper explains in his introduction, not some scale of the literary establishment. What we are offered here, then, is not the university writing programs’ best and brightest, so easy to find elsewhere, but a much-needed “unobstructed view of contemporary fiction at its real, unbridled, vigorous, percolating best.” If that’s what you’re looking for, then Userlands is a bold vantage point. But maybe more importantly, Cooper’s anthology is an important reminder that while conglomerate media’s stranglehold on publishing outlets isn’t likely to break soon, current web affordances such as blogs will continue to serve as vital venues for writers working on the margins of contemporary fiction and indispensable access points for readers more at home on the Bowery than Park Avenue, even Broadway.
June 14, 2021
In a certain sense, this is a very important book for me, because it inspired me to start my blog. I started the blog because I wanted to have a space to publish my own writing, i.e. short fiction, and I did eventually put other longer work on the blog (or linked to separate blogs). However, it was much easier to write about new books than to keep writing new fiction.
This is an anthology collection of fiction, many from younger writers, even younger than myself at the time I read this (24). They all published their work online from the outset, and most of the time, it shows. I think this is more generally important culturally for its moment, and is now if not obsolete, at least further underground. Technology changes rapidly and while a lot of people still like blogs, I feel like the younger writers now are finding new ways to publish it, some may even be performing it on Tik-Tok or instagram.
These are mostly dark stories, where the influence of Cooper is readily apparent. A few of them were pretty good. A lot of them were pretty average (this is my vague recollection and I will now check what I said at the time). I said that 20% of them are worth reading, and 10% could be published, but these two sub-sets of stories did not necessarily overlap. There are definitely a few pieces that are worth reading, but nearly 15 years later, this can be seen as a Cooper-adjacent book (he does start off the collection with a powerful preface) whose stories may not have aged as well (I am sure these stories could speak to the youth of today, yet things move so quickly that they may consider it antiquated, something that didn't really catch on beyond this). But I'm sure people are still doing this, and I do think it is the most reasonable alternative towards banging one's head against the wall, trying to get someone to read or publish one's work.
http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008...
This is an anthology collection of fiction, many from younger writers, even younger than myself at the time I read this (24). They all published their work online from the outset, and most of the time, it shows. I think this is more generally important culturally for its moment, and is now if not obsolete, at least further underground. Technology changes rapidly and while a lot of people still like blogs, I feel like the younger writers now are finding new ways to publish it, some may even be performing it on Tik-Tok or instagram.
These are mostly dark stories, where the influence of Cooper is readily apparent. A few of them were pretty good. A lot of them were pretty average (this is my vague recollection and I will now check what I said at the time). I said that 20% of them are worth reading, and 10% could be published, but these two sub-sets of stories did not necessarily overlap. There are definitely a few pieces that are worth reading, but nearly 15 years later, this can be seen as a Cooper-adjacent book (he does start off the collection with a powerful preface) whose stories may not have aged as well (I am sure these stories could speak to the youth of today, yet things move so quickly that they may consider it antiquated, something that didn't really catch on beyond this). But I'm sure people are still doing this, and I do think it is the most reasonable alternative towards banging one's head against the wall, trying to get someone to read or publish one's work.
http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2008...
February 10, 2016
Dennis Cooper's introduction to the book says that these pieces were chosen from the group that assembled around his blog in the early 1990s. So this was already a self-selecting group. I don't know Cooper's work, and I don't know how well knowing it might have prepared me for some of the stories in this collection. I rate them poorly because they were not to my taste. Nothing was particularly poorly written (although there was at least one example of one of those twee "I don't use capital letters" pieces that, as an editor, I reject out of hand), but most were vignettes or scenes rather than actual short stories. At least one had the feel of a dream transcribed scene for scene - it made no sense and I don't know that author well enough to understand what some of the references might have meant. I couldn't finish the collection, as it felt too much like slogging through a huge stack of high school English assignments from a particularly underfunded school.
October 5, 2007
I am a mega fan of Dennis Cooper's blog, and "Userlands" is a collection of writings from writers who participate on his blog. The writing is strong and consistent, and the book touches on a lot of subjects.
I do strongly suggest everyone who reads this to visit Dennis' blog on a daily basis. It has everything from porn to high literature and the visual arts. It is an excellent place to pick up new names as well as the old avant-garde. Do enjoy!
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blog...
I do strongly suggest everyone who reads this to visit Dennis' blog on a daily basis. It has everything from porn to high literature and the visual arts. It is an excellent place to pick up new names as well as the old avant-garde. Do enjoy!
http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blog...
July 25, 2016
Full Review
Like any anthology, not every piece works. However, it's an overall solid collection of experimental, transgressive, and interesting writing. This book shows even more why it's such a loss for Dennis Cooper's blog to be deleted when this had come out of it. Even if he's not able to get it back up, at least this was able to come out of it.
Like any anthology, not every piece works. However, it's an overall solid collection of experimental, transgressive, and interesting writing. This book shows even more why it's such a loss for Dennis Cooper's blog to be deleted when this had come out of it. Even if he's not able to get it back up, at least this was able to come out of it.
March 6, 2008
In the vast junkyard of the internet these pieces must have looked like diamonds, but many of them were just not strong enough to be in a published anthology. There was some good stuff in here, but too much of it relied on shock value rather than good writing or original ideas.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews