Douglas Anthony Cooper

This article is about the writer. For the American Civil War general, see Douglas H. Cooper.

Douglas Anthony Cooper is a writer who was the first to serialize a novel on the World Wide Web: Delirium, published in 1994 by Time Warner Electronic Publishing (TWEP).

He continues to be at the forefront of electronic publishing, and his Young Adult novel, Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help, became a surprise bestseller when it was accidentally published in Amazon Kindle format by Doubleday. It was deemed a "2008 Book of the Year" by the United Kingdom's foremost children's review site: Lovereading 4 Kids.

Cooper has recently become prominent as an essayist dealing with issues of animal euthanasia and shelter killing. He has written a series of articles for the Huffington Post, highly critical of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), and in support of the No Kill movement. This work, "PETA's Death Cult," was announced on September 20 2012 as a finalist for the Canadian Online Publishing Awards, in the category of "Best Online-Only Article or Series of Articles."

Life, education and themes

Douglas Anthony Cooper was born in Toronto, Canada. Much of his fiction was written in New York City, where he was a Contributing Editor at New York Magazine. He currently resides in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Cooper has an M.A. in philosophy. He studied architecture, but did not complete a degree. These are the disciplines that inform his first two novels, which have been described as "architectural fiction." Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times wrote that his "elliptical narrative style recalls works by D. M. Thomas, Paul Auster, Sam Shepard and Vladimir Nabokov."

Architectural collaboration

Cooper often works with the world's leading architects, including a number of projects around the globe with Diller Scofidio + Renfro involving new media. His works with Diller Scofidio + Renfro include a landscape piece at the 2002 World's Fair in Switzerland, and "Chain City," a video installation at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He also partnered with Peter Eisenman on a major piece for the Architecture Triennial in Milan: an installation based on Cooper's second novel, Delirium.

Novels

• Amnesia (1992), Cooper's first novel, was nominated for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and longlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. It chronicles the unraveling of a Toronto family, and the amnesiac girl who ruins one of its children, Izzy Darlow. The book is structured as an urban labyrinth, in which the obsessive power of Eros does battle with the compulsive need to forget. Cooper deals with memory theory throughout the novel, and emphasizes its relationship to classical rhetoric. He studied Latin rhetoric, and was a serious competitive debater in college - he was Canadian National Champion in 1985, and Runner-Up Best Speaker at the 1985 World Championships. Amnesia gained a following among architecture students and academic theorists, and Cooper has been deeply involved in the architectural community as an artistic collaborator.

• Delirium (1998) was the first novel to be serialized on the World Wide Web. It was initially published digitally in 1994, by Time Warner Electronic Publishing (TWEP), a pioneering effort to create online content. Delirium is the second Izzy Darlow novel, and follows the character to Manhattan. Darlow finds himself caught up in the tale of Ariel Price, a legendary architect who has vowed to murder his own biographer. The experiment in architectural structure initiated by Amnesia becomes increasingly complex and monstrous, in line with the projects designed by Price. The New York Times observed that Cooper "invents an underground city of the dead and the disenfranchised that suggests the night visions in The Crying of Lot 49 (by Thomas Pynchon)." The novel deals with problems of narrative itself, and in particular a person's will to control his or her story, even after death. As with Amnesia, Delirium addresses the nature of horror, and the impossible drive to redeem the broken ego.

• Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help (2007) is a gothic novel for young adults about a pair of flamboyant teenagers who can see and converse with dead students, and their war with the school psychologist who is set on convincing them that they cannot. It is a black comic look at the tactics of guidance counselors and juvenile psychiatrists. It was on the Financial Times Bestseller List in London, England, after the paper observed: "Appealing to the misfit in all of us, Milrose Munce is a grand, gigglesome read."

• Milrose Munce and the Plague of the Toxic Fungus (2011) is Cooper's second Milrose Munce novel for young adults. It pits Milrose against a cult of teen alchemists, who have kidnapped his girlfriend and are determined to graft her to an enormous corpse flower. The novel celebrates the need to find humor in even the most appalling circumstances.

External links

• Huffington Post Cooper's writing for the Huffington Post (including "PETA's Death Cult," a series about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animal's controversial practice of euthanasia)
• An Overview of The Dysarchitecture of Douglas Cooper - Critical Essay by Nancy Costigan
• Reviews of Douglas Anthony Cooper's Novels
• Canadian Gothic - Travel Essay Collected in Best American Travel Writing 2004.