Binge, Douglas Coupland
Binge, Douglas Coupland
List: $22.95 | Sale: $16.07
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Binge
60 stories to make your brain feel different

Author: Douglas Coupland

Narrator: Salvatore Antonio, Stephanie Belding, Victoria Carr, Jarvis Cocker, Douglas Coupland, Bret Easton Ellis, Anna Faris, Will Ferguson, Genki Ferguson, Chuck Klosterman, Andrew Moodie, Jane Pratt, Katie Ryerson, Michael Stipe

Unabridged: 6 hr 16 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/05/2021


Synopsis

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.

Featuring stories narrated by:

Victoria Carr; Selena Dhillon; Stephanie Belding; Lorna Wilson; Liz Dunn; Jane Pratt; Charlotte Shaifer; Caleb Stull; Salvatore Antonio; Will Ferguson; Douglas Coupland ; Genki Ferguson; Jarvis Cocker; Chuck Klosterman; Michael Stipe; and Bret Easton Ellis

About The Author

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 humour and cultural relevancy thirty years since initial publication. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, eight nonfiction books. He has written and performed for England's Royal Shakespeare Company, is a columnist for The Financial Times of London and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Munich's Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018, his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. Coupland 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.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ron

Coupland's best work since his earliest: these interconnected micro-sized stories are insightful, honest, often uncomfortable and frequently hilarious.......more

Goodreads review by Sam

Binge is Douglas Coupland’s first work of fiction since his excellent 2013 novel Worst. Person. Ever (I gather he’s been busy focusing on his visual artwork in the interim). So, even though as a fan I’m glad to see him publishing again, it’s a shame that it’s not particularly good. The subtitle is “......more

Goodreads review by Kilburn

Douglas Coupland, the maestro of cultural dissection, invites readers into the frenzied feast of Binge, a concoction of 60 precisely honed micro-fiction pieces that serve as an X-ray of our contemporary world. Each story, on average 4.2 pages in length, unveils a blackly funny tableau, capturing the......more

Goodreads review by Andrea

I’ve read all of Douglas Coupland’s books and I think this was my favorite—I absolutely loved these brief interlocking stories. Astonishingly entertaining!......more


Quotes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

“The 60 pieces of micro-fiction found in [Binge]—sometimes linked, occasionally by plotline, but mainly by recurring characters—are precisely honed. . . . Hooks abound in Binge, pulling readers from one bite-sized story . . . to the next.” —Maclean’s

“[A] diverting set of literary appetizers.”Publishers Weekly

"[A] mind-bender. . . . Coupland’s voice is as clever as ever, creating a specific sense of place.” —Winnipeg Free Press