City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver

Douglas Coupland describes the spirit of his hometown, Vancouver, in this fascinating, stylish collection of words and images. Vancouver is a beautiful city famous for snowboarding, Greenpeace, cyberpunk, Generation X, The X Files and Culture Jamming. Now discover what it's like from the inside. Clever, eclectic, insightful and provocative, City of Glass reveals the real Vancouver: a social laboratory for new ways of thinking and living, blending extreme politics and sports, European, Asian and indigenous cultures. The 70 colour images include breathtaking shots of the city from eminent photographers, as well as ephemera such as unique Campbell's soup cans with Cantonese/English/French labels.

A witty survey by the noted chronicler of alternative culture

"There's nothing about Vancouver on the book shelves that offers any visual sense of our city's being a laboratory for new ways of thinking and living. Which it is. Especially after World War II -- design and art and architecture from then and ongoing." -- Douglas Coupland

A stylish little book of text and image in which Douglas Coupland captures the essence of his home town, Vancouver.
The world sees Vancouver as a beautiful city harbouring a special secret -- a snowboarding Pacific sphinx, brash and free of historical luggage. The city is also the birthplace of cultural phenomena such as Greenpeace, cyberpunk, the schism of Generation X, The X Files and now, Culture Jamming.
So -- what is Vancouver really like?
What does Vancouver feel like from the inside?
Electric, provocative, witty and, above all, eerily perceptive, here is Vancouver inside out, from the Grouse Grind to glass towers, First Nations to feng-shui, Kitsilano to Cantonese. Here's life in the social laboratory of extreme politics and extreme sports, where Europe meets Asia meets indigenous, and where the notion of Paradise at the end of a Canadian rainbow is rewritten every day.
Coupland's 25,000-word text, broken up into 49 personal categories, is matched with a like number of images reflecting the unexpected city: archival photographs, "beauty" shots, images from internationally known photo-artists, and ephemera such as Campbell's soup cans with Cantonese/English/French labels ( ... the only such cans in the world).
Full of inimitable insights, this unique little book is designed by Coupland and Vancouver's Judith Steedman in the manner of underground Japanese magazines. Unlike any take on Vancouver that anyone has seen before, Coupland's exploration of his home city will intrigue his broad and growing international audience.
Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Sollingen, Germany, and raised in West Vancouver, where he still resides, in a house designed by Ron Thon. Among his best-sellers are Generation X, Polaroids from the Dead, Microserfs and, most recently, Miss Wyoming -- altogether in print in some 30 countries. Less well known is the fact that he is a graduate of the Emily Carr School of Art and Design in Vancouver and that his on-going design experiments include everything from launching a line of furniture to Smirnoff vodka ads for the New Yorker (a fundraiser for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee). His journalism ranges form a short story on Dolly the cloned sheep in Time magazine (U.S. edition) to guest-editing two special issues of Vancouver Magazine on Vancouver's quirky future as a city state on the Pacific.

Douglas Coupland was born December 30, 1961 on a Canadian military base in Baden-Soellingen, Germany. He attended Emily Carr College of Art and Design in Vancouver in 1984 and he completed a two-year course in Japanese business science in Hawaii in 1986. His career has consisted of writing, sculpting, and editing and he also hosted The Search for Generation X, a PBS documentary, 1991. His work includes Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Shampoo Planet, Life after God, and Polaroids from the Dead. He has also contributed articles to periodicals, including The New Republic, The New York Times, Wired, and Saturday Night.

with flaps