Binge
Easy read
Expressive
Depressing

Binge 60 Stories to Make Your Head Feel Different

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.
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Reviews

Photo of Cindy Lieberman
Cindy Lieberman@chicindy
4 stars
Mar 26, 2022

Great audiobook of contemporary stories - more like vignettes- voiced by a variety of well-known actors and writers. These vignettes are interwoven as they are retold from other points of view. There’s no overall plot, but I enjoyed the contrasting perspectives— not of a single event, but of the everyday things we experience or witness, including traffic accidents, viral social media, and airplane flights, and the people with whom we cross paths, how sometimes these chance connections can be quite significant to our lives.

Photo of Howard Lo
Howard Lo@talk19
5 stars
Oct 10, 2021
+7
Photo of Jerry Eakes
Jerry Eakes@jeakes
5 stars
Feb 13, 2023