Generation X - by Douglas Coupland (Paperback)

About the Book

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

Book Synopsis

Generation X is Douglas Coupland's classic novel about the generation born from 1960 to 1978--a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings.

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges--peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.

Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.

About the Author

Douglas Coupland was born on the 4-Wing Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany in 1961. He is the author of Miss Wyoming, Generation X, All Families are Psychotic, and Girlfriend in a Coma, among others. He attended the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.