JPod, Douglas Coupland
JPod, Douglas Coupland
List: $22.50 | Sale: $15.75
Club: $11.25

JPod

Author: Douglas Coupland

Narrator: Marc Cashman

Unabridged: 10 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/16/2006

Synopsis

Very evil…very funny
A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Douglas Coupland’s new novel updates Microserfs for the age of Google.

Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers are bureaucratically marooned in JPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver video game design company.
The six jPodders wage daily battle against the demands of a bone-headed marketing staff, who daily torture employees with idiotic changes to already idiotic games. Meanwhile, Ethan’s personal life is shaped (or twisted) by phenomena as disparate as Hollywood, marijuana grow-ops, people-smuggling, ballroom dancing, and the rise of China. JPod’s universe is amoral and shameless–and dizzyingly fast-paced. The characters are products of their era even as they’re creating it. Everybody in Ethan’s life inhabits a moral gray zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself. 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.

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, and 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, Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Kunstinstituut Melly 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 Nate on April 30, 2012

Here's what I've noticed. People that have read extensive Coupland novels view this book more negatively. People who have never/barely read Coupland love this book. It is my opinion that this is a very good book. It's sarcastic, witty, satirical, and outlandish. This didn't come from the same Coupla......more

Goodreads review by Angela on December 07, 2015

Recently, a new friend introduced me to the concept of biji, a Chinese form of writing roughly translated as ‘brush notes’ or ‘jottings’. This literary genre is defined by a three-part division consisting of different styles and lacking definitive structure. I sought an example of the format and was......more

Goodreads review by Grace on July 23, 2007

funny as hell. i laughed my arse reading this.. hohoohho. this is so relevant to everyone working with technology today.......more

Goodreads review by Christopher on April 18, 2007

I don't know what anyone expects from Douglas Coupland these days, much less what I expect from the man. I've read everything he's published since Generation X...sometimes I love it, sometimes I loathe it, sometimes I'm just bored. But this one made me laugh. A lot. And he brings back his plugged-in......more

Goodreads review by Matt on January 15, 2008

...although a lot of the criticism is warranted. that being said, however, i think what i liked about 'jpod' is coupland's healthy dose of cynacism (a lot of it directed at himself and his celebrity) within the novel's 440 some-odd pages. it's also easy to pass this off as 'microserfs 2.0,' but to d......more

Quotes

“Coupland is an accomplished and talented writer whose books are perennial bestsellers.” —Quill and Quire

“[JPod] is a work in which [Coupland's] familiar misgivings about life on the technological cusp are again invoked, but also one in which the skills he’s been developing as a novelist pay off, where his satirical streak and his social consciousness finally stop fooling around with each other and settle down together. . . . JPod is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away.” —The New York Times Book Review

“JPod is a seriously funny book, . . . a rolling thunder of sustained comedy, first page to last, as it ends up, and skewers the shamelessness and amorality that define our era. . . . Coupland’s timing is impeccable: JPod is the right book at the right time.” —The Globe and Mail

“Imagine a cocktail of The Office, Weeds and Wired magazine, shaken not stirred . . . The master ironist just might redefine E.M. Forster’s famous dictate ‘Only Connect’ for the Google age.” —USA Today

“Coupland once again nails the zeitgeist of the age. . . . The best thing about JPod is its characteristic good writing . . . and its dark, unflagging wit.” —Calgary Sun

“Coupland is possibly the most gifted exegete of North American mass culture writing today. . . . JPod is without a doubt his strongest, best-observed novel since Microserfs.” —The Guardian

Praise for Hey Nostradamus!:

“A leap sideways from the acid irony which has shaded some of Coupland’s earlier novels. Instead, from the pen of one of the coolest authors on the planet has come a work of suffusing humanity.”
–Sunday Herald (UK)

“The leading literary voice of the most cynical generation lets it all out in a blaze of spirituality, terror, high comedy and soul-searching, and does it all in a way that is caring and clever, heartbreaking and hilarious, tough and tender. . .not only Coupland’s best novel, but also one of the best of the year.”
–The Hamilton Spectator

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List