Click here to read an excerpt and view an author photo

Click here to watch a short film based on Userlands anthology. The film, by Nicholas Rhoades, is directed by Brandon Walley, co-directed by Natasha Beste, animated by Nicole MacDonald, and produced by Tania Shurko.

From Dennis Cooper: "In the early '90s, I edited an anthology called Discontents (Amethyst Press, 1994) that documented the amazing creativity of the young writers and artists involved in the then-exploding queer zine phenomenon. The book, now considered a classic, is currently being taught in numerous universities and features a number of new writers who have since gone on to be well-known and important figures: David Sedaris, Dale Peck, Dorothy Allison, Scott Heim, Eileen Myles, and others. With the advent of the Internet, the energy and talent that produced the zine movement gradually moved online, and that same vitality now fuels the similarly grassroots if higher-tech phenomenon of blogging, with individual blogs forming the early-21st-century equivalent of the zine. The blog has provided a new kind of forum for new writers to disseminate their work and form mutually interested and supportive communities outside the major publishing industry, whose conservatism and biases toward university-trained fiction writers is well-known.

"This anthology intends to bring to light some of the new fiction writers who are using the Internet's labyrinthine array of blogs and personal web pages to expose, test, and develop their work. The contributors range in age from sixteen to early forties. They are gay, straight, and in some cases still searching for their identities. They live in North America's cities and small towns as well as in countries as physically far afield as Norway, Italy, Spain, Denmark, France, and the UK. Their fiction ranges in character from adventurous literary works to pieces that are astonishingly emotional, sexual, and/or personally revealing. What unifies them is their extraordinary talent, their daring and highly individualistic approaches to composing fiction, and the breathtaking freshness, charge, and skill of their prose. Somewhere in this anthology's collection of mostly unknown, exciting voices are the next important writers of English language fiction."

Contributors: More than thirty new writers, including Frankie p, Aaron Nielsen, Bett Williams, Jack Dickson, Justin Taylor, Thomas Kendall, Stanya Hahn, Eddie Beverage, Nick Hudson, Patrick De Witt, Joshua Dalton, and others.

Dennis Cooper is the editor of the imprint Little House on the Bowery/Akashic Books. He is author of eight novels, most recently God Jr. (Grove Press) and The Sluts (Carroll & Graf.) His novels have been translated into eighteen foreign languages. He has guest-edited sections of fiction and non-fiction for Bookforum, Nerve, the L.A. Weekly Literary Supplement, the Village Voice Literary Supplement, and other publications. He is a Contributing Editor of Artforum Magazine.