All posts tagged: Douglas

Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas

Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas

Published by Jenni Sidey

An emergency alert goes out to every phone on one side of a Florida town. Severe summer storms, high winds, curfew in effect from midnight until six, running through October. It reads like weather. It is not weather. Somebody with money has worked out that a community whose people clean hotel rooms at dawn and close bars at two cannot survive a rule that makes it illegal to be outside at night, and he has written that rule specifically to trap one man. Midnight Curfew by Penelope Douglas hangs an entire novel on that single piece of paperwork, and it is the most efficient thing she has built in years. How Midnight Curfew Is Built The architecture is worth describing, because it does most of the work. Two narrators alternate, both in first person present tense. Dallas Jaeger is twenty-five, teaches philosophy at the private academy on the rich side of the tracks, and belongs to a family that has held its land for five hundred years by refusing to be moved. Callum Ames is …

John of John by Douglas Stuart

John of John by Douglas Stuart

Published by José Betancourt

There is a moment early in John of John by Douglas Stuart when a young man hangs up a public phone after listening to his father read scripture from three hundred miles away. He has just been told that his grandmother’s feet are the colour of calves’ liver. He cannot mention where he is sleeping, who he has slept with, or what he has eaten to stay alive that week. His father cannot say very much at all. Between them sit sea, rock, and Gaelic psalm, and in that careful distance an entire novel is already breathing. This is Douglas Stuart’s third book, after the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain and the wrenching Young Mungo. For this one he leaves Glasgow behind and steers the small ferry north and west, towards the Isle of Harris, where the rain comes sideways, the sheep outnumber the souls, and the Free Presbyterian Church still keeps quiet account of who has missed a Sunday and who has been seen too often with whom. The Setup, Spoiler-Free John-Calum Macleod, called Cal, comes …

3 things Will Douglas Heaven is into right now

3 things Will Douglas Heaven is into right now

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Finding signs of life in the uncanny valley Watching Sora ­videos of Michael Jackson stealing a box of chicken nuggets or Sam Altman biting into the pink meat of a flame-grilled Pikachu has given me flashbacks to an Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain I saw a few months ago. Atkins is one of the most influential and unsettling British artists of his generation. He is best known for hyper-detailed CG animations of himself (pore-perfect skin, janky movement) that play with the virtual representation of human emotions.  Still from ED ATKINS PIANOWORK 2 2023COURTESY: THE ARTIST, CABINET GALLERY, LONDON, DÉPENDANCE, BRUSSELS, GLADSTONE GALLERY In The Worm we see a CGI Atkins make a long-distance call to his mother during a covid lockdown. The audio is from a recording of an actual conversation. Are we watching Atkins cry or his avatar? Our attention flickers between two realities. “When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s known as corpsing,” Atkins has said. “I want everything I make to corpse.” Next to Atkins’s work, generative videos look …