Douglas Coupland Livres

"Génération X" (10/18, n° 2508) qui a connu un gros succès, était le portrait d'un univers édifiant sur l'avancée du monde. Avec Microserfs, Douglas Coupland s'offre une plongée vertigineuse dans le virtuel. Mais comme Coupland ne fait rien à moitié, il s'est au préalable fait engager deux mois chez Microsoft avant d'entamer une Cybersaga peuplée de héros dont on ne sait jamais vraiment s'ils ne vont pas nous imploser sous les yeux. Ces enfants de Bill Gates, nourris de référence télé, progressent en défrichant leurs états d'âme. Car -c'est une surprise- des états d'âme, ces golden boys du pays virtuel n'en manquent pas. Ce livre est aussi comme ces dernières stations avant l'autoroute : dernier avertissement avant un monde de dingues. C'est passionnant.

Douglas Coupland redefines the biography genre in his account of communication guru Marshall McLuhan. With humor and literary brilliance, Coupland presents the life of this eccentric thinker, helping us understand how McLuhan's ideas relate to our interconnected 21st-century lives.

Nine short non-fiction pieces with a forward by Shumon Basar.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER 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.

A highly provocative and visionary exploration of our rapidly evolving digital era, this work extends Marshall McLuhan's analysis of technology's influence on culture to the present day. The authors navigate a world redefined by the Internet, coining the term 'extreme present' to describe our current experience. This quick-fire paperback captures the essence of our digital lives through a blend of images, language, and perceptions. They outline five characteristics of the Extreme Present, create a glossary of new terms reflecting our feelings, and feature over 30 contemporary artists' illustrations. The striking graphic design by Wayne Daly mirrors the surreal, juxtaposed nature of digital culture, making it feel like an insightful email to the reader. This paper portrait of Now reveals how the Internet has not only altered our brains but also the planet itself, presenting a fresh history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket. Contributions from a diverse array of artists enhance the narrative, showcasing a rich tapestry of contemporary thought and creativity.

YOU ARE THE FIRST GENERATION RAISED WITHOUT RELIGION What happens if we are raised without religion or beliefs? As we grow older, the beauty and disenchantments of the world temper our souls. We all have spiritual impulses, yet where do these impulses flow in a world of commodities and consumerism? LIFE AFTER GOD is a compellingly innovative collection of stories responding to these themes. Douglas Coupland takes us into worlds we know exist but rarely see, finding rare grace amid our pre-millennium turmoil.

The cult storyteller's most original, outrageous, and heart-rending work yeta wicked novel perfect for (grown-up) fans of Tim Burton, Neil Gaiman, Scarlett Thomas, The Mighty Boosh, and Roald Dahl In a room above a bizarre German museum, far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives the Old Man. Caretaker of the museum by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken by the occasional crunch of a spider between his blackened teeth. The Old Man, the respectable Doctor Ernst Frohlicher, his greedy dog Hans, and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk all find their lives thrown together as they uncover a crime so outrageous that it will shock the world. From its sinister opening to its explosive denouement, this dark tale blends lavishly entertaining storytelling with Rhodes's macabre imagination, entrancing originality, and magical touch.

Pregnant and secretly married, Cheryl Anway scribbles what becomes her last will and testament on a school binder shortly before a rampaging trio of misfit classmates gun her down in a high school cafeteria. Overrun with paranoia, teenage angst, and religious zeal in the massacre's wake, this sleepy suburban neighborhood declares its saints, brands its demons, and moves on. But for a handful of people still reeling from that horrific day, life remains permanently derailed. Four dramatically different characters tell their stories: Cheryl, who calmly narrates her own death; Jason, the boy no one knew was her husband, still marooned ten years later by his loss; Heather, the woman trying to love the shattered Jason; and Jason's father, Reg, whose rigid religiosity has separated him from nearly everyone he loves. Hey Nostradamus! is an unforgettable portrait of people wrestling with spirituality and with sorrow and its acceptance.

Three twenty-something young adults, working at low-paying, no-future jobs, tell one another modern tales of love and death.

Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose surnames end in 'J' are bureaucratically marooned in JPod. JPod is a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst, and the ashes of the 1990s financial tech dream. JPod's universe is amoral and shameless. The characters are products of their era even as they're creating it. Everybody in Ethan's life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life.

Douglas Coupland's new book Bit Rot is published on the occasion of his eponymous exhibition at Witte de With, Rotterdam in autumn/winter 2015/16 (11 September 2015 - 3 January 2016).The book combines fictional short stories with essays, and creates a parallel narrative to the exhibition itself: pieces in the exhibition become materializations of words, and some of the words in this book are a dematerialization of objects in the show.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 (and quickly) decompose. It also describes, Coupland explains, the way his brain has been feeling since 2000.

From the author of JPod and Generation X, the bestselling generational classic, comes a dazzling new work that reimagines the very act of reading and storytelling in a crazed digital world.

Following the hugely acclaimed bestseller Hey Nostradamus comes a major new novel from Douglas Coupland: the wonderfully warm, funny, life-affirming story of Liz Dunn, a woman who has spent her whole life alone and lonely - until now... This is a major work of commercial literary fiction from an author who just gets better and better.

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.

Sarah, the star of the latest Nasa shuttle mission, has an elegant mother, an ex-husband and three children. But three of them have AIDS, one is manic-drepressive and one was shot in the stomach by his father. No one is looking forward to getting together for Sarah's pre-flight farewell banquet.

The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore. In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—sort of a Clerks-meets-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of twenty-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And then there’s Roger’s co-worker Bethany, who’s at the end of her Goth phase, and young enough to be looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in Aisle Six. One day, Bethany comes across Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her—and spookily, he is getting her right. She also learns he has a tragedy in his past—and suddenly he no longer seems like just a paper-stocking robot with a name tag. These two retail workers strike up a peculiar and touching epistolary relationship, reminding us that love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief highlights number-one bestselling author Douglas Coupland’s eye for the comedy, loneliness and strange comforts of contemporary life.

The brilliant new novel from the bestselling cult author of them all.

Girls, memory, parenting, millennial fear - all served Coupland-style.

A real-time five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. It explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion and the afterlife.

A razor-sharp portrait of a morally bankrupt and gleefully wicked modern man, Worst. Person. Ever. is Douglas Coupland's gloriously filthy, side-splittingly funny and unforgettable new novel. Meet Raymond Gunt. A decent chap who tries to do the right thing. Or, to put it another way, the worst person ever: a foul-mouthed, misanthropic cameraman, trailing creditors, ex-wives and unhappy homeless people in his wake. Men dislike him, women flee from him. Worst. Person. Ever. is a deeply unworthy book about a dreadful human being with absolutely no redeeming social value. Gunt, in the words of the author, "is a living, walking, talking, hot steaming pile of pure id." He's a B-unit cameraman who enters an amusing downward failure spiral that takes him from London to Los Angeles and then on to an obscure island in the Pacific where a major American TV network is shooting a Survivor-style reality show. Along the way, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, is forced to re-enact the 'Angry Dance' from the movie Billy Elliot and finds himself at the centre of a nuclear war. We also meet Raymond's upwardly failing sidekick, Neal, as well as Raymond's ex-wife, Fiona, herself 'an atomic bomb of pain'.Even though he really puts the 'anti' in anti-hero, you may find Raymond Gunt an oddly likeable character.

A collection of Douglas Coupland's articles and short fiction pieces. It offers Coupland's thoughts on topics such as the life and death of Kurt Cobain, and the bizarre behaviour of Harolds - teenagers obsessed with hanging about in cemeteries.

#Artselfie opens with an incisive remark by Douglas Coupland, who warns us that "Selfies are mirrors we can freeze. ... Selfies allow us to see how others look at themselves in a mirror making their modeling face when nobody's around-- except these days, everybody's around everywhere all the time." #artselfie emerged in 2012, right as the recent photographic phenomenon known as the selfie reached its tipping point. It was subsequently activated by New York based collective DIS, as an aggregated mode of art-tourism and documentation. These selfies and their dialogue with art are an opportunity to revisit fundamental questions such as: if art is a mirror, what happens when we place ourselves between it and the camera? The traditional trajectory from photographer to subject via the camera has been subverted, and with it, the nature of images and our perception of them. The #artselfie makes every participant both protagonist and collaborator, consumer and producer. Including an introduction by Douglas Coupland (author of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and ruthless observer of contemporary society) and a discussion between Simon Castets (director of the Swiss Institute in New York and co-founder of the 89+ project) and DIS, #artselfie allows us to experience how significant -- and seductive -- this viral phenomenon is

The future is no longer the distant, mythical condition it once was to us. Technology has placed it at our fingertips. It wasn’t so long ago that we marveled at devices that could tell us where we were at that exact moment; it became odd when they recently began to tell us where we would soon be. The most important issue, however, might not be whether a future coproduced and made readily available to us by technology is good or bad, but rather how we want to relate to it as human beings. The three essays by Douglas Coupland collected in this volume address this question and describe how the technological advances that are currently radically revising our notion of the future are shaping us as much as we are shaping them.

A közeljövőről szóló hátborzongató víziót fest a kanadai szerző új regénye. A globális kereskedelem még működik, az emberek pedig blogok és vlogok révén értesülnek a világ különböző tájain élő emberek hóbortjairól. A kormányok gyengélkednek, a repülés luxus, és egy igazi alma egy vagyonba kerül. Közben egy új gyógyszer, a Solon, egyre népszerűbbé válik, amely megszünteti a jövőtől való félelmet, de a közösségi élmények iránti igényt is csökkenti, így az emberek magányosan élnek. A méhek kipusztulásának titka rejtve marad, mígnem öt fiatalt megcsíp egy méh, és kutatóközpontba kerülnek, ahol kísérleteznek velük. Hamarosan a méhcsípettek sztárok lesznek, de a hírnév múlandó, és egy kanadai szigeten találják magukat, ahol történeteket kell kitalálniuk. Fokozatosan felfedik a világ pusztulása mögötti hátborzongató machinációt. A történet sajátos fénytörést ad a szerző korábbi művének, az X generációnak, ahol különc alakok ironikus, világvége-hangulatú meséket osztanak meg egymással, de most egy új nemzedék találja meg a történetmondás új módját a pusztuló, de talán még menthető világban.

Ariel Manto has a fascination with 19th-century scientists--especially Thomas Lumas and "The End of Mr. Y," a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between.

Karen hat sich von ihrem Mann getrennt und wartet nun in der Flughafenbar auf ihr Blinddate. Ex-Alkoholiker Rick ist der Barkeeper und nicht gerade vom Glück verfolgt, doch er hat einen Plan: Mit seinem ersparten Geld möchte er zu einem Motivationstrainer gehen. Luke, ein Pfarrer, hat die Kirche hinter sich gelassen, nicht ohne die Spendenkasse mitzunehmen. Jetzt trinkt er Whiskey und denkt über seine Zukunft nach. Rachel, jung und emotionslos, möchte beweisen, dass sie sich ändern kann. Sie beschließt, einen Mann zu finden, der sie schwängert. Doch dann kommt alles anders. Ein Heckenschütze erschießt Karens Blinddate, eine Giftgaswolke breitet sich aus. Ausnahmezustand – und die Bar scheint der einzige Zufluchtsort zu sein ...

Кто-то спился, кто-то — сторчался, кто-то просто вырос и продался истеблишменту. История Поколения Икс закончена. Настали «нулевые» — время Поколения А. Новая Зеландия. Франция. Канада. Шри-Ланка. Средний Запад США. Людей Поколения А все больше. Пока что их можно не замечать, игнорировать, не принимать всерьез. Но они… изменят мир, и это — только вопрос времени. Вопрос только — хочет ли мир, чтоб Поколение А его изменяло?