I’ll confess that I missed Dennis Cooper‘s last novel, The Sluts, when it came out in 2006, but I understand that it’s just won Le Prix Sade, a French literary prize for writers who are “going beyond all forms of censure and who [defy] the moral or political order against all forms of intellectual terrorism,” especially, looking over the list of previous winners, if they put in lots of sex. (Which is not a knock, by any means; when it comes to transgressive literature, Cooper was an acknowledged master long before this, and I’m sorry I was out of town when he read at NYU last week.)
Cooper is the first American writer to win the award since it was established in 2001; previous recipients recognizable to American readers: Catherine Millet and Alain Robbe-Grillet.