Works by
Bernard Cooper
(Writer)
[1951 - ]

Fiction

• A Year of Rhymes (1993)

Memoirs

• Maps to Anywhere (1990)

• Truth Serum: Memoirs (1996)

• The Bill from My Father: A Memoir (2006) -- Winner 2006 Lambda Literary Award for Biography (Gay Male)
  Edward Cooper is a hard man to know.Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictate the always uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Balding, octogenarian, and partial to a polyester jumpsuit, Edward Cooper makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his son he looms larger than life, an overwhelming and baffling presence.
  
  Edward's ambivalent regard for his son is the springboard from which this deeply intelligent memoir takes flight. By the time the author receives his inheritance (which includes a message his father taped to the underside of a safe deposit box), and sees the surprising epitaph inscribed on his father's headstone, The Bill from My Father has become a penetrating meditation on both monetary and emotional indebtedness, and on the mysterious nature of memory and love.

Short Fiction

• Guess Again: Short Stories (2000) -- Finalist 2002 ALA\GLBTRT Award for Literature
  From the O. Henry Prize and PEN/ Hemingway Award-winning author of Truth Serum and Maps to Anywhere comes a masterful, exquisitely crafted collection of short stories.
  
  Bernard Cooper's fiction probes some of the most perplexing experiences of modern American life: the unpredictable nature of love, the riddle of sexuality, the intricacies of family relationships, and coping with loss in the age of AIDS. With his razor-sharp wit and unsparing honesty, Cooper peels back layers of the familiar, exposing the surprising truths that shape our lives.
  
  In "Bit-O-Honey," a middle-aged barber visits his estranged father on Halloween, disguised as a trick-or-treater; a young pregnant woman in "What to Name the Baby" negotiates life with her father and his elderly lover while traveling in a cramped Winnebago; and in "Hunters and Gatherers," a Mormon couple orchestrates a misguided party game while hosting a dinner for the few homosexuals they know.
  
  Whether Cooper is writing about a dying man's acts of vandalism, a divorce under house arrest, or a young boy's sexual awakening, his stories contain startling insight into the workings of the human heart. Resonant and often hilarious, the stories in Guess Again are unlike any you have read before.

See also:

• Best American Gay Fiction #2 (1996) with Brian Bouldrey

• Literature:  The Human Experience -- Shorter Reading and Writing (2007) by Marvin Klotz and Richard Abcarian
  Includes the essay, "A Clack of Tiny Sparks: Remembrances of a Gay Boyhood"

• Something Inside: Conversations With Gay Fiction Writers (1980, 1999)  by Philip Gambone, Compiler and Robert Giard, Photographer
  In the last twenty years, gay literature has earned a place at the American and British literary tables, spawning its own constellation of important writers and winning a dedicated audience. No one though, until Philip Gambone, has attempted to offer a collective portrait of our most important gay writers. This collection of interviews attempts just that, and is notable both for the depth of Gambone's probing conversations and for the sheer range of important authors included. Virtually every prominent gay author writing in English today is here, including Alan Hollinghurst, Allen Barnett, Andrew Holleran, Bernard Cooper, Brad Gooch, Brian Keith Jackson, Christopher Bram, David Leavitt, David Plante, Dennis Cooper, Edmund White, Gary Glickman, John Preston, Joseph Hansen, Lev Raphael, Michael Cunningham, Michael Lowenthal, Michael Nava, Paul Monette, Peter Cameron, and Scott Heim.