The Strangler Fig

By Douglas Anthony Cooper

Fiction / Thriller

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From the author of Amnesia

Seventeen years in the writing, The Strangler Fig features a female Don Giovanni: a talented photographer who incorporates her seduced victims into pornography that destroys their dignity, and often their lives. It involves a production of Strindberg’s A Dream Play performed by despairing cam girls; and a choreographer whose entire troupe consists of professional fighters who have been crippled in the ring. The novel features an introduction by architectural theorist Jennifer Bloomer, author of Architecture and Text: the Scrypts of Joyce and Piranesi (Yale University Press).

Douglas Anthony Cooper is a Canadian novelist living in Rome, whose books have been translated into Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. His first novel, Amnesia, was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that his "elliptical narrative style recalls works by D. M. Thomas, Paul Auster, Sam Shepard and Vladimir Nabokov." Cooper was a contributing editor at New York Magazine, where he wrote and photographed the travel stories. He won the Lowell Thomas Gold Medal — America’s most prestigious travel writing award — and a National Magazine Award in Canada; and one of his essays was chosen by Pico Iyer for collection in The Best America Travel Writing. Cooper has written extensively as an animal activist on behalf of the No Kill movement, and his series on PETA’s mass killing of dogs and cats was shortlisted for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards.