All Families are Psychotic

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007117531
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
On the eve of the next Space Shuttle mission, a divided family comes together...Warm, witty and wise, 'All Families Are Psychotic' is Coupland at the very top of his form. In a cheap motel an hour from Cape Canaveral, Janet Drummond takes her medication, and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her children. Wade has spent the night in jail; suicidal Bryan is due to arrive at any moment with his vowel-free girlfriend, Shw; and then there is Sarah, 'a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash' - here in Orlando to be the star of Friday's shuttle mission. With Janet's ex-husband and his trophy wife also in town, Janet spends a moment contemplating her family, and where it all went wrong. Or did it? Perfect for fans of Halle Butler, Iain Reid and Rachel Cusk.

Hidden Valley Road

Author: Robert Kolker
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385543778
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Generation A

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0307372790
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
“Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address May 8, 1994 Generation A is a brilliant, timely and very Couplandesque novel about honey bees and the world we may soon live in. Once again, Douglas Coupland captures the spirit of a generation. In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined. Generation A mirrors 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland's writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. Imaginative, inventive and fantastically entertaining, Generation A demonstrates Coupland's unforgettable verve.

Life After God

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 147110558X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
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.

Hey Nostradamus!

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371409
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
Four people’s lives are set adrift in the wake of a high school shooting—three can’t escape the loneliness that plagues them, while a fourth races for oblivion, wondering what happened to God. Bristling with Douglas Coupland’s hallmark humor and cultural acuity, Hey Nostradamus! achieves new heights of poignancy and literary accomplishment.

Miss Wyoming

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0375727809
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves. Waking up in an LA hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life. Susan Colgate is an unbankable former TV star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear. John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.

Generation X

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312054366
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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

JPod

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371395
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Book Description
A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Coupland’s JPod updates Microserfs for the age of Google. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose names start with J are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, 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, as readers will see. Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.

Player One

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887849687
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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

The Gum Thief

Author: Douglas Coupland
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596917539
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Douglas Coupland's inventive novel-think Clerks meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, "aisles associates" at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger's opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger's unsettled-and unsettling-life.Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them...and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.