"[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. Effortlessly entering taboo areas, he lends them a specific gravity, a justification for existing, and does so with such punk daring he makes most writers' concerns seem hopelessly middlebrow and puny by comparison." - Bret Easton Ellis "The best kind of critic." - Portland Mercury "Even when he steps away from the transgressive, taboo subject matter on which he made his reputation, Cooper's outsider perspective and cold, hard, practically violent stare remains hypnotic." - San Francisco Chronicle "The pieces.show facets of Cooper's particular genius you don't see in his formally and thematically controlled fiction.More than anything, Smothered in Hugs will send you out into the world--to the bookstore, record store, art gallery, library--in search of the lost classics Cooper so excitedly introduces.

" - Blackbook magazine "373 pages of an intelligent mind wrestling with American--and occasionally German and occasionally British--culture." - The Stranger magazine "But even in these moments of intense melancholy, Ugly Man has a lightness that Cooper hasn't achieved elsewhere. Though the collection deals with topics that are shocking, even abhorrent, it is certainly this highly talented author's most accessible work to date." - Time Out New York "Potent and humorous. As always, the need for connection--even if experienced at the level of unspeakable yet intimate violence--as well as the need to expose what lies underneath are Cooper's main preoccupations." - New York Times Book Review "There's a stainless steel sheen to Cooper's sentences that is as admirable as anything this side of Didion." - Salon "Cooper delivers with the unswerving faith of someone who lives and dies by his gut reactions but also with the methodical intelligence of someone who parses those reactions so he can articulate them to the sharpest degree. Smothered in Hugs has the sweetness of a time capsule buried in a schoolyard.

" - Los Angeles Times "Cooper delivers with the unswerving faith of someone who lives and dies by his gut reactions but also with the methodical intelligence of someone who parses those reactions so he can articulate them to the sharpest degree." - Los Angeles Times "It's a joy to watch Cooper's mind at work." - Time Out Chicago.