Postcards from over the edge: editing his new line of books, Dennis Cooper is determined to live up to his own edgy standards. (books).

"I'm looking for stuff that blows my mind," says Dennis Cooper. "It has to be adventurous. I don't want to start publishing books that are normal. Those books can already get published."

The gay cult novelist--author of the controversial Frisk, Guide, and My Loose Thread, among others--is talking about his latest literary project, one he's not writing. Akashic Books, along with Cooper, has launched the Little House on the Bowery series, showcasing writers whose work might otherwise be deemed uncommercial. The first book in his series, Victims, by first-time novelist Travis Jeppesen, is about a suicidal religious cult and its members' bizarre attempts to erase their own human characteristics. It's boldly strange, funny, and, with its shifting narrators and unusual form, at time s confusing.

That's part of its appeal for Cooper. "The literature I've always loved makes you feel like you're on drugs or something. You're disoriented," he says. "And Travis is really special. He came to me at a reading and gave me his writing a couple years ago. I read him and was blown away, so I stayed in touch. I get a lot of work from young writers. I represent something to them, I guess, because I'm sort of a radical writer and somewhat prominent, in the same way that [William] Burroughs was to me when I was young. I always try to help people, [but] it's become so difficult to get anything weird published. I tried to get him an agent and there was just no way. So I thought, I have to get this out myself, and that's what started the whole thing."

Akashic officials' role in this Oprah's Book Club for People Who've Had It With Oprah was simple: They said yes. "Independent literature is in a constant struggle to escape obscurity," says Akashic publisher Johnny Temple. "You need every break you can get to get anyone to care. [Working with Cooper is] a quality control mechanism. Dennis has a tremendous amount of integrity and he wouldn't put his name on just anything."

Asked whether his name will really help sell books, Cooper has a realistic sense of humor about it. "That's going to have a good and bad effect, maybe," he says, laughing. "It's up to Akashic how much they want to exploit my name. There will be people drawn to it because my name's attached, but then there will be people who'll be like, 'Jesus Christ, no.'"

It's a dichotomous response that has trailed Cooper since his early days as a published novelist. His work, characterized by spare, poetic narratives and extremely graphic explorations of teenage violence, sex, and abuse, has earned him plenty of notoriety, especially from the gay press.

"People are always surprised that I'm not a monster. They meet me and say, 'God, you're nice!'" says Cooper. "I knew when I wrote Frisk [about a young gay man who becomes obsessed with the idea of killing his sex partners] that I would never, ever live that one down. I knew that in many ways it was the 'wrong' thing to do, but I felt like it was important to do anyway."

After Frisk, Cooper says, "My audience became less gay and more diverse. There's this whole group of people who don't care or know that the books are part of a whole, a puzzle. That used to really hurt me because I thought [the negative attention] was just so wrong-headed I've read articles that called me the most dangerous writer in America2 Gimme a break."

When told that he will be a part of the gay pride issue ("Really? Wow! That's a first!"), Cooper is frank about what that means to him. "I think being gay is a great thing. I wouldn't trade it for the world. I encourage everyone to try it,' he says, laughing. "But it's such a weird time. You've got gay culture turning into this weird narcissistic, consumerist thing--a collective insanity. Ultimately, I think that it's important that I am gay and that I write honestly, and I assume that my work holds the same place it's always held--an example that you don't have to conform. The answer to being embarrassed by what your community does is not to deny you're gay but to believe in it even more. It's like, there are still kids being beaten up in school. That hasn't gone away."

White' writes about film for E! Online.