Bernard Cooper

Growing up in the suburbs confused about his sexuality, about his consumer-oriented world, about the death of his older brother Bernard Cooper falls in love with Pop art and sets off for the California Institute of the Arts, the center of the burgeoning field of conceptual art, in this beguiling memoir. The most famous, and infamous, artists of the time drift through the place, including Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari, not to mention the student who phones the Identi-Kit division of the Los Angeles Police Department and has them make a composite drawing of the Mona Lisa. My Avant-Garde Education is at once an artist's coming-of-age story and a personal chronicle of the era of conceptual art, from a writer "of uncommon subtlety and nuance" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times). It is a record of the wonders and follies of a certain era in art history, always aware that awakening to art is, for a young person, inseparable from awakening to the ever-shifting nature of the self."

Edward Cooper was a hard man to know. Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictated the always-uncertain climate of the Cooper household. Now – balding, octogenarian – he makes an unlikely literary muse. But to his now middle-aged son, he looms larger than life, an overwhelming, baffling presence. Edward Cooper made his name as a divorce attorney in LA whose cases were devoured by the tabloids. Now, he is slowly succumbing to dementia. As Bernard attempts to forge a coherent picture of his family history, he uncovers Edward's lawsuits against other family members, and recalls the itemized invoice his father once sent him for the total cost of his upbringing, for the sum of two million dollars. 'Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Father is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain. Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note. This memoir amazes' Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones 'Cooper is a beautiful writer . . . his book is in a class of its own . . . Somehow, this is a story about all parents and their grown-up children and how they manage to keep going through all the insults and mixed messages and botched attempts to express love' Observer 'Cooper's wry, rueful memoir of a lifetime's wrangling with the old guy is memorably moving, emotionally disciplined, devilish in the detail and smartly funny. Read it now' The Times

Synopsis coming soon.......

The essays in Maps to Anywhere plot terrain that is at once familiar and subtly strange. Writing on subjects ranging from his family to the origin of the barbershop pole, Bernard Cooper digs into the glimmering surface of the southern California landscape, observing the collision of the American Dream with the realities of everyday life. From the fragments, he discovers landmarks by which he attempts to make sense of contemporary America.