| With
his razor-sharp wit and unsparing honesty, Bernard Cooper peels
back layers of the familiar, exposing the surprising truths
that shape our lives. Cooper’s prose is resonant and exquisitely
crafted. Often described as a “writer’s writer,”
his disarming memoirs and fiction and his open-hearted, humorous
readings and lectures have won him a loyal audience. Growing
up gay and middle class in the Los
Angeles of the 1950s and 60s, sexuality, familial relationships,
loss, and AIDS — these are among Bernard Cooper’s
primary subjects. Through them all, he expresses his deepest
concern: how the writer explores identity by traveling the terrain
of memory. Recalling details with delicacy and inventiveness,
Cooper’s sensibility ultimately transforms the way we
examine our own lives.
Bernard Cooper has written two collections
of memoirs, Maps
to Anywhere and Truth
Serum, as well as a novel, A Year of Rhymes,
and a collection of short stories, Guess
Again. His work has appeared in Story,
Ploughshares, Harper’s, The Paris Review, The New York
Times Magazine, and in anthologies such as The Best American
Essays, and The Oxford Book of Literature on Aging,
and the Library of America’s Writing
Los Angeles. He is the author of The
Bill From My Father: A Memoir (paperback 2007),
which is being made into a Warner Brothers film by director
Dean Parisot.
Bernard Cooper has won numerous awards
and prizes, among them the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, an O.
Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from
the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been read
on This American Life and Selected Shorts from Symphonyspace.
Bernard Cooper has taught at Antioch/Los Angeles and at the
UCLA Writer’s Program and is currently the art critic
for Los Angeles Magazine.
•••
“Cooper...has
a voice that is fluid and engaging.”
— The New York
Times Book Review
“Reading Cooper
is like reading Chekhov, he’s really that good.”
—Tony
Kushner
“Cooper’s
love for his characters is evident in their self-deprecating
humor and the poetic imagery of his writing.”
— Publishers
Weekly
“Funny but not
jokey, moral but not preachy, Bernard Cooper's stories reflect
a great sense of humor and a bottomless reserve of humanity.
Guess Again is a remarkable book.”
— David
Sedaris |
