Generation A mirrors Coupland's debut novel, 1991's Generation X. It explores new ways of storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland'swriting, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. Imaginative, inventive, and fantastically entertaining, Generation A is his most ambitious work to date.
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TRINCOMALEE, SRI LANKA
How can we be alive and not wonder about the stories we use to knit together this place we call the world? Without stories, our universe is merely rocks and clouds and lava and blackness. It's a village scraped raw by warm waters leaving not a trace of what existed before.
Imagine a tropical sky, ten miles high and a thousand years off on the horizon. Imagine air that feels like honey on your forehead; imagine air that comes out of your lungs cooler than when it entered.
Imagine hearing a dry hiss outside your office building's window. Imagine walking to the window's louvered shutters and looking out and seeing the entire contents of the world you know flow past you in a surprisingly soothing, quiet sluice of gray mud: palm fronds, donkeys, the local Fanta bottler's Jeep, unlocked bicycles, dead dogs, beer crates, shrimper's skiffs, barbed wire fences, garbage, ginger flowers, oil sheds, Mercedes tour buses, chicken delivery vans.
...corpses
...plywood sheets
...dolphins
...a moped
...a tennis net
...laundry baskets
...a baby
...baseball caps
...more dead dogs
...corrugated zinc
Imagine a space alien is standing with you there in the room as you read these words. What do you say to him? Her? It? What was once alive is now dead. Would aliens even know the difference between life and death? Perhaps aliens experience something else just as unexpected as life. And what would that be? What would they say to themselves to plaster over the unexplainable cracks of everyday existence, let alone a tsunami? What myths or lies do they hold true? How do they tell stories?
Now look back out your window -- look at what the gods have barfed out of your subconscious and into the world -- the warm, muddy river of dead cats, old women cauled in moist saris, aluminum propane canisters, a dead goat, flies that buzz unharmed just above the fray.
...picnic coolers
...clumps of grass
...a sunburnt Scandinavian pederast
...white plastic stacking chairs
...drowned soldiers tangled in gun straps
And then what do you do -- do you pray? What is prayer but a wish for the events in your life to string together to form a story -- something that makes some sense of events you know have meaning.
And so I pray.
Copyright © 2009 by Douglas Coupland
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition, Special Edition. Never been read, signed deluxe edition still in original shrink wrap. `With this exceptional sequel to GENERATION X, Douglas Coupland may be one of the smartest, wittiest writers around . He is a terrifically good writer . GENERATION A is set in the near future . Bees have become extinct, but then five people are stung . It is the attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery that brings the five together on an Alaskan island where they are made to tell stories to one another. Coupland weaves common elements across these tales and into the main narrative: large themes . comic themes . existential themes . There is a compelling plot . Coupland scatters his smartly satirical observations throughout . This is a clever, brilliant book - and it's loads better than GENERATION X . funny and profound.' --Esquire. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # ABE-1702919320189
Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition, Limited Edition. Signed Limited Slipcased Edition by Douglas Coupland . Book is Unread . Front/Back: New . Spine: New . Pages: New and unread . Page Edges: New . Slipcase: New . Printing: 24681097531 . NOT price-clipped . Year: 2009. Signed by Author(s). Seller Inventory # 2121