Publisher Description
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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About Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian writer, visual artist, and designer. His first novel is the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, still celebrated for its biting humor and cultural relevancy thirty years since initial publication. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, eight nonfiction books. He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
About the Narrators
Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of eight nonfiction books, two novels, and a short story collection. He has written for the New York Times, The Washington Post, London Guardian, Billboard, GQ, and more. He served as the ethicist for the New York Times Magazine for three years, appeared as himself in the LCD Soundsystem documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.
Bret Easton Ellis is the author of several novels, including Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. His works have been translated into twenty-seven languages and are read throughout the world. Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, and The Informers have all been made into films. He divides his time between Los Angeles and New York City.
Louise Brealey, AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator, studied history at Cambridge University before studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in Manhattan. On television, she appeared in the long-running medical drama Casualty on BBC One in 2002, appearing in ninety-six episodes. Afterwards, she appeared in the BBC serialization of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, as well as Hotel Babylon, Law & Order: UK, Ripper Street, and in all series of Sherlock as Molly Hooper.
Will Ferguson is the author of several award-winning and critically-acclaimed books, including Beyond Belfast and Happiness. His work has been nominated for both an IMPAC Dublin Award and a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. He lives in Calgary, Canada.
James Langton, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and later as a musician at the Guildhall School in London. He has worked in radio, film, and television, also appearing in theater in England and on Broadway. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002.