Maps to Anywhere

As its title intimates, this set of essays captures the open-ended, rootless feel of modern life. Cooper, whose writings have appeared in Harper's and Grand Street , lets his imagination play freely over sundry topics--barber poles, learning to draw, modern architecture, dinosaurs, photography, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, being childless. Growing up in Southern California, he dreamed of utopias while his ``home life resisted perfection.'' From his father, and from the taste of horseradish, he learned that pleasure can merge with pain. He writes movingly of his brother dying of leukemia, and of his hyperenergetic, eccentric father, a lawyer who took on odd cases. Cooper's ironic tone is at once self-deprecating and subverting of the reader's preconceptions. Autobiographical fragments, prose poems, spiels and mini-essays crafted with precision are dazzling, elusive shards in this jigsaw. (June)