Reading Writers

Competing Fantasies: K. Austin Collins on Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts

Reading Writers

Show Notes

In an incendiary season finale, the insightful and hilarious K. Austin Collins joins to discuss Dennis Cooper's controversial classic, The Sluts. Other topics of debate include the old internet, social media in fiction, and the world's ultimate unreliable narrators: service review writers. Thanks to all our listeners and guests for a wonderful second season!

K. Austin Collins is a film critic. His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Ringer, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of BLACK COP, forthcoming from Doubleday, and DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, about Frederick Wiseman’s 2001 documentary of the same name, forthcoming from Fireflies Press.

Send questions, requests, recommendations, and your own thoughts about any of the books discussed today to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte’s most recent book is An Honest Woman: A Memoir of Love and Sex Work. Learn more at charoshane.com Jo co-edits The Stopgap and their writing lives at jolivingstone.com.

To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

More from Reading Writers

Mar 11, 2026

In the Season 3 finale, Jo sells Charlotte on Alan Warner’s “amazingly textured” Movern Callar, which leads the hosts to reflect on some of the season’s recurring themes. They’re then joined by the radically reflective William C. Anderson, who explains how the Buddhism transmitted in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Zen Battles, a commentary on the teachings of Master Linji, informed his political development.

Mar 4, 2026

Charlotte puzzles over who exactly wrote Brighton Rock before Jo shares a newfound fascination with big machines, spurred in part by Don Gillmor’s On Oil. A conversation with the preternaturally wise Rayne Fisher-Quann starts with Iris Owens' After Claude, then opens up into a rousing feminist seminar on Margery Kempe, sexual obsession, and women’s humor of past and present.

Feb 25, 2026

Jo and Charlotte turn their attention to Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe’s mindblowing A Personal Matter and Troubled Lands: Stories of Mexico and Cuba, a collection translated by Langston Hughes, before they’re joined by Gothic-literature-loving writer-of-all-modes Nicholas Russell, who puts the spotlight on Algernon Blackwood’s unsettling preoccupation with mysterious forces in the natural world.

Feb 18, 2026

Charlotte and Jo go deep on jealousy, self-hatred, and vulnerability in a conversation that touches on A Separate Peace, The Go-Between, Beowulf, and more. Then the canny and intrepid Maya Binyam joins for a discussion about the category of little girlhood, ambiguity in fiction, and female desire.

Feb 4, 2026

Jo takes us on a whirlwind tour of their recent reading, including Mary Helen Washington’s Paule Marshall: A Writer’s Life, and Charlotte explains why Susanna Moore’s In the Cut is one of the most thrilling novels she’s ever encountered. Then, the profoundly thoughtful Jamie Hood joins to explore the many boyfriends and political disappointments of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

See all episodes →