title: Userlands: New Fiction Writers from the Blogging Underground (Little House on the Bowery)
author:  Dennis Cooper 
description: <div>Dennis Cooper is the author of 'The George Miles Cycle,' an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer (1989), Frisk (1991), Try (1994), Guide (1997), and Period (2000). The cycle has been translated into fourteen languages. His most recent novel is My Loose Thread (Canongate, 2002). He lives in Los Angeles.</div>
zlib_text: ### Annotation
  
  The first thing you notice when reading Eastern Standard Tribe is that it
  suggests a methodology that Doctorow follows when building his novels:
  identify and research a cool new idea, add more and more cool bits to that
  idea, and then build _that_ into a story. In Down and Out the cool idea was
  reputation-based economies, and in Tribe it's a new kind of social group
  emerging that chooses to abandon its local standard time to live and work in
  stop with another more desirable one...
  
  
  Damien Broderick, in a recent review, coined the rather amusing term
  "blogpunk," which seems to very much apply to Doctorow's work. It refers to
  the tendency of writers of online journals to accumulate fascinating factoids
  and then share them amongst themselves. And, to an extent, you can see that in
  Tribe. The novel's background is full of cool things — cars running on lard
  and such — but it's just that, background. At its heart, Tribe is a witty,
  sometimes acerbic poke in the eye at modern