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This irresistible little book offers a very different take on Vancouver, one of the world''s most beautiful cities. Douglas Coupland applies his unique sensibility to everything from the Grouse Grind to glass towers, First Nations to feng shui, Kitsilano to Cantonese. Cleverly designed to mimic an underground Japanese magazine, this edition is fully updated and revised with riffs on Vancouver as a neon city, a land of treehuggers, and more.

"Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address May 8, 1994


A brilliant, timely and very Couplandesque novel about honey bees and the world we may soon live in. Once again, Douglas Coupland captures the spirit of a generation….

In the near future bees are extinct - until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined.

Generation A mirrors 1991's Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and storytelling in a digital world.


From the Hardcover edition.

Full of surprises and insights, Souvenir of Canada presents us as we have never seen ourselves before in an irresistible flow of text and image.

Douglas Coupland offers new ways of seeing and experiencing Canada -- looking at how it feels to be a Canadian right now and speculating what it might feel like to be a Canadian in the future. From our collective memories, he locates objects like stubbie beer bottles and ookpiks, Kraft dinner and maple walnut ice cream. And with the same unique sensibility, he considers the FLQ crisis, our relationship with the United States, medicare and the landscape itself.

In the section humbly titled "Cheese," he writes: "When you assemble them together, foods that feel intuitively Canadian look more like camping trip provisions than actual groceries...Canada is a cold and northern country...from a biological standpoint, it is imperative that Canadians stockpile concentrated forms of sugars, carbohydrates, fats and salt."

The 50 personal categories of the 30,000-word text are arranged alphabetically and matched with 100 illustrations (50 in colour) -- new luscious photos taken by Coupland himself, images of Canadian ephemera and icons, historical photos and pictures from other quite startling sources.

This book is the first full-length study of Douglas Coupland, one of the twenty-first century's most innovative and influential novelists. The study explores the prolific first decade and a half of Coupland's career, from "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" (1991) to "JPod" (2006), a period in which he published ten novels and four significant volumes of non-fiction. Designed for students, researchers and general readers alike, the study is structured around thematically focused chapters that consider Coupland's engagement with narrative, consumer culture, space, religion and ideas of the future.

In 1980, Terry Fox was just a young man with a dream. Three years earlier, he had lost a leg to cancer. Some combination of passion, idealism and sheer guts led to the impossible notion that he would run across Canada on one good leg and a prosthesis. His goal was to raise $1 from every Canadian to help find a cure for cancer. Twenty-five years later, the dream remains alive, and Terry''s legacy has raised more than $360 million for cancer research.

Terry has been written with the support of the Fox family and the design reflects the style of Douglas Coupland''s Souvenir projects, mixing more than 145 superb photographs of a previously unknown collection of family memorabilia with a very moving text about Terry''s life and the Marathon of Hope. Printed in full colour, the book brings a profound moment in Canadian history, and the young man who inspired it, freshly to life.

Shampoo Planet is the rich and dazzling point where two worlds collide -- those of 1960s parents and their 1990s offspring, "Global Teens." Raised in a hippie commune, Tyler Johnson is an ambitious twenty-year-old Reagan youth, living in a decaying northwest city and aspiring to a career with the corporation whose offices his mother once firebombed.

This six-month chronicle of Tyler''s life takes us to Paris and the ongoing party beside Jim Morrison''s grave, to a wild island in British Columbia, the freak-filled redwood forests of northern California, a cheesy Hollywood, ultra-modern Seattle, and finally back home. On the way we meet a constellation of characters, among them: Jasmine, Tyler''s Woodstock mom; Dan, his land-developer stepfather; "Princess Stephanie," Tyler''s European summer fling; and Anna Louise, his post-feminist girlfriend with an eating disorder.

Tyler''s dizzying journey into the contemporary psyche -- a voyage full of rock videos, toxic waste, french-fry computers, and clear-cut forests -- is a spellbinding signature novel for a generation coming of age as the millennium comes to a close.

Douglas Coupland was born December 30, 1961 on a Canadian military base in Baden-Soellingen, Germany. He graduated from Sentinel Secondary School in West Vancouver in 1979 and went on to McGill University. He was unhappy there and went on to Emily Carr College of Art and Design. He has said that these were the best four years of his life. He graduated in 1984 with a focus on sculpture and moved on to study at the European Design Institute in Milan. He also completed a two-year course in Japanese business science in Hawaii in 1986.He soon began writing for magazines as a means of paying the bills. He soon started work on his first novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture which was published in 1991. His second novel Shampoo Planet focused on the generation after Generation X and was published in 1992. This generation was termed "Global Teens". His career has consisted of writing, sculpting, and editing and he also hosted The Search for Generation X, a PBS documentary, 1991. Douglas Coupland has also worked on a magazine called Wired . He wrote a short story about the life of the employees of Mocrosoft Corporation. This short story provided inspiration for his novel Microserfs.

The most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction.
The Drummond family, reunited for the first time in years, has gathered near Cape Canaveral to watch the launch into space of their beloved daughter and sister, Sarah. Against the Technicolor unreality of Florida''s finest tourist attractions, the Drummonds stumble into every illicit activity under the tropical sun-kidnapping, blackmail, gunplay, and black market negotiations, to name a few. But even as the Drummonds'' lives spin out of control, Coupland reminds us of their humanity at every turn, hammering out a hilarious masterpiece with the keen eye of a cultural critic and the heart and soul of a gifted storyteller. He tells not only the characters'' stories but also the story of our times--thalidomide, AIDS, born-again Christianity, drugs, divorce, the Internet-all bound together with the familiar glue of family love and madness.

From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves.

Waking up in an L.A. hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he''s led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life.

Susan Colgate is an unbankable former tv star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band''s popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan''s plane crashes   and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear.

John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.

The story of TV''s longest-running sitcom and the characters who created it, marking twenty years on the air.

"The Simpsons" will celebrate its twentieth anniversary this fall. No other TV show has had the enduring popularity or cultural influence that The Simpsons has. When it premiered in 1989, the enthusiastic reaction to its subversive humor was instantaneous. It is one of the most astounding successes in TV history. John Ortved''s unauthorized history-the first ever to look behind the scenes of this pop culture phenomenon-tells how the series grew from a controversial cult favourite to a mainstream powerhouse thanks to a group of intense, thoughtful, and creative people who came together to make something unique in the history of American culture. The writers, animators, producers, and network executives-as much a dysfunctional but loving family as the show''s stars themselves-are all here. It''s an intriguing yet hilarious tale full of betrayal, ambition, and love. More than an amusing narrative of the making of The Simpsons, this is an intimate look at the characters behind this cultural juggernaut-their creativity, intelligence, hubris, ego, and passion. The result is a book that is as amusing, dramatic, and compelling as the show itself.