Douglas Coupland

Over the course of several months, two retail workers at an office supply superstore--Roger, a divorced, middle-aged "aisles associate" at Staples, and his young co-worker, Bethany, an early twenty-something, former Goth--strike up a unique epistolary friendship, in a novel about love, loneliness, and the offbeat comforts of modern-day life.

A Novel

The Gum Thief

Tyler Johnson is an apocalyptic entrepreneur in the making. His memories begin with Ronald Reagan. With his neat girlfriend, smart jokes and shampoo collection, he works at the nuclear power plant where his hippie parents used to demonstrate, plotting his fortune. But fortune has other plans - the return of a Paris summer fling, one of the 'low-ambition Euro-teens', who takes Tyler on the road to the shimmering dreams of L.A.

Shampoo Planet

Story of five people caught inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster.

What is to Become of Us : a Novel in Five Hours

Player One

In the near future bees are believed to be extinct until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.

Generation A

The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one. Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not. Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living- the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny. Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls "the voice of the people," inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own- crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.

60 Stories to Make Your Head Feel Different

Binge

A former beauty-pageant contender-turned-actress and a filmmaker whose hedonistic world has been turned upside down by a medical crisis shed their former identities to wander Los Angeles in search of true love.

Miss Wyoming

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Shumon Basar

A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era. 50 years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'. THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read. Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket. 30+ artists contributions: With contributions from Farah Al Qasimi, Ed Atkins, Alessandro Bavo, Gabriele Basilico, Josh Bitelli, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Alex Mackin Dolan, Thomas Dozol, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B Evans, Rami Farook, Hans-Peter Feldmann, GCC, K-Hole, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eloise Hawser, Camille Henrot, Hu Fang, K-Hole, Koo Jeong-A, Katja Novitskova, Lara Ogel, Trevor Paglen, Yuri Patterson, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Michael Stipe, Rosemarie Trockel, Amalia Ulman, David Weir, Trevor Yeung.

A Guide to the Extreme Present

The Age of Earthquakes

Surveys the life and career of the social theorist best known for the quotation, "The medium is the message," who helped shape the culture of the 1960s and predicted the future of television and the rise of the Internet.

You Know Nothing of My Work!

Marshall McLuhan

Douglas Coupland's new book 'Bit Rot', published on the occasion of his exhibition at Witte de With, combines fictional short stories with columns, and creates a parallel narrative to the exhibition itself. 'Bit Rot' addresses subjects such as the death of the middle class, the rise of the internet and its impact on our lives, and in short, evinces a shedding of twentieth-century notions of what the future is and could be. The book is named after a phenomenon in digital archiving that describes the way digital files of any sort spontaneously decompose.

Bit Rot

"Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Raymond Gunt, in the words of the author, is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id.

Worst. Person. Ever

Douglas Coupland takes his sparkling literary talent in a new direction with this crackling collection of takes on life and death in North America -- from his sweeping portrait of Grateful Dead culture to the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and the middle class. For years, Coupland's razor-sharp insights into what it means to be human in an age of technology have garnered the highest praise from fans and critics alike. At last, Coupland has assembled a wide variety of stories and personal "postcards" about pivotal people and places that have defined our modern lives. Polaroids from the Dead is a skillful combination of stories, fact and fiction -- keen outtakes on life in the late 20th century, exploring the recent past and a society obsessed with celebrity, crime and death. Princess Diana, Nicole Brown Simpson and Madonna are but some of the people scrutinized.

Polaroids from the Dead

Andy, Dag and Claire have been handed a society beyond their means. Twentysomethings, brought up with divorce, Watergate and Three Mile Island, and scarred by the 80s fallout of yuppies, recession, crack and Ronald Reagan, they represent the new generation - Generation X. Fiercely suspicious of being lumped together as an advertiser's target market, they have quit dreary careers and cut themselves adrift in the California desert. Unsure of their futures, they immerse themselves in a regime of heavy drinking and working in no future McJobs in the service industry. Underemployed, overeducated and intensely private and unpredicatable, they have nowhere to direct their anger, no one to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie. So they tell stories: disturbingly funny tales that reveal their barricaded inner world. A world populated with dead TV shows, 'Elvis moments' and semi-disposible Swedish furniture.

Tales for an Accelerated Culture

Generation X

Karen goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it, she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter; once out of it, 18 years later, she finds herself a middle-aged mother whose friends have all gone through all the normal marital, social and political traumas and back again.

Girlfriend in a Coma

Dio odia il Giappone. Romanzo d'amore e fine del mondo

Machines Will Make Better Choices Than Humans

They are Microserfs—six code-crunching computer whizzes who spend upward of sixteen hours a day "coding" and eating "flat" foods (food which, like Kraft singles, can be passed underneath closed doors) as they fearfully scan company e-mail to learn whether the great Bill is going to "flame" one of them. But now there's a chance to become innovators instead of cogs in the gargantuan Microsoft machine. The intrepid Microserfs are striking out on their own—living together in a shared digital flophouse as they desperately try to cultivate well-rounded lives and find love amid the dislocated, subhuman whir and buzz of their computer-driven world.

Microserfs

In Douglas Coupland's writing, the doldrums of a world afflicted by the pains of dotcom booms and busts, the ascendency of subcultures to pop cultures, and the subsequent struggle for identity are counterbalanced by droll, personal, and incisive analyses. This collection of nonfiction essays provides an illuminating meander through what we call culture today. Douglas Coupland is a Canadian writer, visual artist, and designer. His first novel, Generation X, was an international bestseller. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, and seven nonfiction books; written and performed for the the Royal Shakespeare Company; and has penned a number of works for film and television. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Wired magazine, and the Financial Times.

Ideas, Essays, and Stories for the Increasingly Real Twenty-first Century

Shopping in Jail

Coupland examines Alcatel-Lucent, which is one of the largest global telecommunications companies in the world, although most people have never heard of it. He tours the offices and labs in the United States, France, Canada, and China, and discusses the influence that the Internet in general, and Alcatel in particular, has on the way we live.

Inside Alcatel-Lucent

Kitten Clone

Ethan and his five co-workers are marooned in Jpod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive game-design company. There they wage battle against the demands of boneheaded marketing staff who torture them with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan's personal life is being invaded by marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, global piracy and the rise of China. Everybody in both worlds seems to inhabit a moral grey zone, and nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly strait-laced parents or Coupland himself ...

Douglas Coupland

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