Tuesday's Pick: T Cooper at City Lights Books

T Cooper is interested in history as written by the losers. Not losers in the Greenberg-esque, misanthropic-shitbag sense, but those who've been on the ass-end of history's atrocities. Cooper edited the 2007 anthology The Fictional History of the United States With Huge Chunks Missing, which told the nation's alternate past with a gallows humor that would make Howard Zinn blanch. In his latest, the illustrated novel The Beaufort Diaries, he finds an unlikely hero: an anthropomorphic polar bear who escapes the melting Arctic for Hollywood, and ends up palling around with Leonardo DiCaprio. The duo begins work on an action film about the environment, as Beaufort the polar bear contends with the temptations and pitfalls of the Sunset Strip. In the hands of another contemporary author, such a scenario could end up cloying and precious, a too-cute premise for a Threadless t-shirt extended to a novel-length tale. Fortunately, T Cooper doesn't do precious: He's too concerned with matters of consequence to lower himself to whimsy. Despite the fanciful setup, there's some real pathos in this bildungsroman of a character hustling to stave off extinction. A wayward polar bear may be Cooper's most put-upon loser yet, but the resourceful Beaufort refuses to go quietly on a sinking ice floe. -- Paul Davis