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>
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  We're back and more hard-boiled than ever.
  
  Call us self-serving, but this time we'd like to thank some of the
  
  
  critics who've supported Old School Books. In case you missed it,
  
  
  here's what a few of them had to say:
  
  Spin: "Walking the mean streets with hearts set on dreams they
  
  
  know damn well they'll never reach, these authors keep it realer
  
  
  than any rapper knows how.... They testify to how much was lost
  
  
  when these novelists couldn't get read as seriously as they should
  
  
  have."
  
  The Source: "They take the brutality and ruin of the urban black
  
  
  landscape and transform them into art."
  
  Playboy: "One of the most exciting literary revival series since
  
  
  the rediscovery of Jim Thompson's novels."
  
  Detour: "The Old School will give the modern reader a wakeup slap, alerting
  them to a subversive canon too long ignored."
  
  Details: "Down-and-dirty tales about real O.G.'s, stories that
  
  
  drop you in the middle of the crumbling 