In these trying times for literary literature (“lit-lit” anyone?), the commercial release of a new Dennis Cooper book is reason enough to celebrate. Cooper, a cultishly followed novelist dedicated to the difficult and the taboo, was dropped by his longtime publisher, Grove, a few years ago, forcing him to independently publish his Prix Sade-winning 2005 novel,The Sluts. He’s since been picked up by the cutting-edge, Cal Morgan-led PBO imprint Harper Perennial, which has just released Smothered In Hugs, a collection of Cooper’s non-fiction work spanning two decades.

It'd be easy to write off such a round-up as a plastic bone intended to placate rabid Cooper fans while drumming up interest for future novels. But Smothered In Hugs is more than marginalia. The pieces—originally published in ArtForum, Spin , and the Village Voice, among other publications—show facets of Cooper’s particular genius you don't see in his formally and thematically controlled fiction. In Hugs, Cooper wears many hats: art critic, cultural sociologist, anti-PC queer thinker battling against a closed-minded mainstream culture and an equally closed-minded queer subculture. Mostly, though, we seem him wandering the pop cultural landscape of the ‘90s, struggling to understand a strange era in real time.

Just as this decade has ushered in a too-soon bloom of 90’s nostalgia (or maybe we’re just getting old), it’s interesting to look back at Cooper’s critiques and profiles of that era’s cultural icons. Particularly devastating is a Kurt Cobain obituary in which Cooper compares Cobain to “God with a dog’s mouth.” Another piece presciently predicts the fallout from Quentin Tarantino’s early success. Also included are early interviews with Keanu Reeves and Leonardo DiCaprio (Cooper asks both about rumored homosexuality—Keanu: “No. But, you never know...”), a lost Stephen Malkmus interview, and what's perhaps the most sympathetic profile of Courtney Love ever written. The Love piece is indicative of Cooper’s ultimate strength as a journalist—the rare ability to see celebrities for who they are, not what they seem to signify. More than anything, Smothered in Hugs will send you out into the world—to the bookstore, record store, art gallery, library—in search of the lost classics Cooper so excitedly introduces. Me, I went searching YouTube, looking for God with a dog’s mouth.