Douglas Coupland Book order

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.

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.

»Wenn sich die Menschen in der Zukunft fragen, wie es war, zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts zu leben, dann sollten sie Douglas Coupland lesen.« Yann Martel Der Begriff Bit Rot bezeichnet einen Vorgang aus dem Feld der digitalen Archivierung: Dateien können sich plötzlich und schnell auflösen. Douglas Coupland - seit Jahrzehnte einer der großen Analytiker unserer digitalen Ära - hat in den letzten Jahren die Erkenntnis gewonnen, dass Bit Rot auch sehr exakt beschreibt » wie sich mein Gehirn seit dem Jahr 2000 angefühlt hat, während ich ältere und schwächere Neuronen und Synapsenverbindungen abbaute und verbesserte, unerwartete neu erschuf.« In seinem Buch mixt Coupland, wie das Internet selbst, verschiedene Textgattungen und stellt sie gleichberechtigt nebeneinander. Auf diese Weise gelingt ihm eine Kritik unserer Vorstellung von einer konsistenten Zukunft und dadurch eine Analyse unserer Gegenwart, die ihresgleichen sucht. Ein Must-Read für die Hypermoderne.

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.

Bit Rot is a gem of the digital age. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix ... you can't stop with just one. 'Bit rot' is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Coupland writes, 'Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones'. Bit Rot the book explores the ways humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.

'It is a book not only inspired by the internet, but seemingly written by the internet. It is as if the internet gained not only artificial self- consciousness but wisdom - and then became your pal.' --Tod Wodicka, The National§§'A new philosophy-cum-modern-self-help book.' -- Vice§§'Coupland is up to his new-old tricks, and this time he's brought some friends. It's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. That's a good thing... The Age of Earthquakes is like the internet in book form. A Tumblr made of paper. Lots of interesting tidbits, philosophical musings presented as fact.' -- LitReactor§§'The Age of Earthquakes is a kind of philosophical Anarchist Cookbook for the online era , when we are in touch with everyone at once all the time, or at least like to feel that we are...It's a book insistently engaged with the present tense. It is both a wave and a particle; content and form. Perhaps it is the 21st century's first book-meme .' -- Pacific Standard

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.

Täglich fotografieren Menschen sich selbst, und eine schwindelerregende Anzahl von Selfies durchzieht die sozialen Netzwerke. Was wird in ihnen sichtbar, jenseits der Annahme, sie seien bloß narzisstische Selbstbilder einer verlorenen Generation? Mit Essays von Theoretikern und Publizisten wie Jerry Saltz, Douglas Coupland und Karen Ann Donnachie bietet der Band eine interdisziplinäre Annäherung an das Phänomen Selfie und beleuchtet dessen Dimensionen, Relevanz und Perspektiven. Die Publikation fungiert sowohl als Selfie-Reader als auch als Ausstellungskatalog und erscheint begleitend zur Ausstellung »Ego Update. Die Zukunft der digitalen Identität« im NRW-Forum Düsseldorf. Diese Ausstellung untersucht den Einfluss digitaler Medien auf die grundlegende Frage der Menschheit: Wer bin ich?

Raymond Gunt likes to think of himself as a pretty decent guy—he believes in helping his fellow man and all that other good stuff. Sure, he can be foulmouthed, occasionally misogynistic, and just generally rub people the wrong way—through no fault of his own! So with all the positive energy he’s creating, it’s a little perplexing to consider the recent downward spiral his life has taken…. An unemployed B-unit cameraman, Gunt accepts his ex-wife’s offer to shoot a Survivor-style reality show on an obscure island in the Pacific. Somehow, Gunt suffers multiple comas and unjust imprisonment, and is forced to reenact the “Angry Dance” from the movie Billy Elliott, among other tribulations and humiliations. Could the universe be trying to tell him something?

#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