Doppelgänger: a novel

By: Riviere, Sam

Published by Catapult, 2026

"At Northwick Author Development Academy, an elite incubator for the creative class, originality is both fetish and mandate. Its candidates arrive ravenous for distinction-only to discover, after a year of carefully engineered "disorientation," that their work has converged into something eerily uniform. When a student in the sophomore cohort, Carl Sample, announces his intention to provoke a stranger into punching him-an act pitched as both personal exorcism and artistic experiment-the action seems grotesque, comic, and vaguely prophetic. Before Carl can enact his plan, another student is assaulted in town. This emerging crisis of coincidence binds the cohort in a tightening web of surveillance and mythmaking, as intention and event fall fatally out of sync. Watched constantly by the Academy's hidden media unit, the students begin to resemble copies of one another-twinned in fear, ambition, and aesthetic drift"--