Coupland, Douglas 1961- (Douglas Campbell Coupland)

PERSONAL:

Born December 30, 1961, on a Canadian military base in Baden-Soellingen, Germany; son of Douglas Charles Thomas (a doctor) and C. Janet Coupland. Education: Attended Emily Carr College of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada, 1984; completed a two-year course in Japanese business science, Hawaii, 1986.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

CAREER:

Writer, sculptor, visual artist, designer, and editor. Global Business Network, designer and futurist. Host of The Search for Generation X (documentary), PBS, 1991. Performed with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Exhibitions: Works have been exhibited in North America, Asia, and Europe.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1991.

Shampoo Planet, Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1992.

Microserfs, ReganBooks (New York, NY), 1995.

Girlfriend in a Coma, ReganBooks (New York, NY), 1998.

Miss Wyoming, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 2000.

God Hates Japan, Kadokawana Shoten (Tokyo, Japan), 2001.

All Families Are Psychotic, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2001.

Hey, Nostradamus! Random House Canada (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2003.

Eleanor Rigby, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2005.

Terry: The Life of Canadian Terry Fox, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2005.

JPod, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2006.

The Gum Thief, Bloomsbury (New York, NY), 2007.

OTHER

(Author of introduction) Slacker (companion to the Richard Linklater movie), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1992.

Life after God (short fiction), Pocket Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Polaroids from the Dead (essays and short fiction), ReganBooks (New York, NY), 1996.

(With Kip Ward) Lara's Book: Lara Croft and the Tomb Raider Phenomenon, Prima Publishers (Rocklin, CA), 1998.

(With others) Disco 2000 (anthology of stories), edited by Sarah Champion, Sceptre (London, England), 1998.

City of Glass: Douglas Coupland's Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2000.

Souvenir of Canada, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2002.

Souvenir of Canada 2, Douglas & McIntyre (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2004.

(Author of introduction) The Vancouver Stories: West Coast Fiction from Canada's Best Writers, Raincoast Books (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada), 2005.

Author of screenplay for film Everything's Gone Green, First Independent Pictures, 2007.

Contributor of articles to periodicals, including New Republic, New York Times, Spin, Wired, and Saturday Night.

Author's works have been translated into thirty-five languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

Douglas Coupland has become known as the voice of a generation, despite his frequent denials in interviews. According to Andrew Anthony in the London Observer, the author "bristles at the idea of being a spokesman for anyone…. To the question of whether he feels like part of a generation, he replies, ‘Like I once ever did?’" Nevertheless, critics continue to see in him, as does John Fraser in Saturday Night, "the self-wrought oracle of our age" and "the Jack Kerouac of his generation." Coupland earned his reputation with his first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which originated the term "Generation X" to refer to those Americans born in the 1960s to early 1970s, defining their aggregate interests, concerns, and problems. About Coupland's status as mouthpiece for Generation X-ers, Fraser added that the author achieved it "with a distinctive style and up-market hustle that still leaves me breathless. Not once, so far as I can tell, did he do a sleazy thing to get where he is. He trudged all the way on his talent alone."

Generation X chronicles the story of three "twenty-something" friends living in Palm Springs, California, and mired in "McJobs"—a term coined by Coupland to indicate jobs with low pay, low dignity, and little future. The book launched its twenty-nine-year-old author straight to the top of the best-seller lists. Coupland is claimed by some to have written the defining document of his generation, "the new Catcher in the Rye," a book about young people "with too many TVs and too few job opportunities," a Newsweek reviewer commented. In the novel, Andy, Claire, and Dag represent Generation X members, and the stories they tell each other in their Palm Springs refuge predict a drab future of "lessness" and an accompanying tedium as the X-ers' fate in life. (One of many neologisms, along with the cartoons and slogans that appear in the book, "lessness" implies the acceptance of lower expectations than those of preceding generations.) "The trio's modern fables of love and death and spacemen and nuclear war sparkle like lumps of quartz amid the granite of their desert life," commented Wright, "each tale offering a small epiphany or moment of spangled optimism amid the prevailing gloom."

Laurel Boone, writing in Books in Canada, found fault with Coupland's story and its annotations. She thought "the cartoons, definitions, slogans, and other ephemera running beside the text in a separate column make shallow comments on the slightly less shallow story." John Williams remarked in New Statesman that Coupland's novel is "self-conscious as hell," but he still found Generation X "charming" and "a surprisingly endearing read." Describing the book as "funny, colorful and accessible," Wright stated that Coupland's first novel possesses "dizzying sparkle and originality," further lauding it as "a blazing debut."

In Shampoo Planet, published a year after Generation X, Coupland turns his attention to "the Global Teens," the generation following the X-ers who were raised in the age of information and video stimulation. Tyler Johnson, the youthful narrator and younger brother of Generation X's narrator, has what Sophfronia Scott Gregory described in Time as "a Smithsonian-class collection of shampoos" (thus the book's title) plus a sister named Daisy—a waif-like, pseudo-hippie sporting blond dreadlocks—and a twice-divorced mother, Jasmine, a true flower child who seems to Tyler more in need of parenting than he is. "Although the author is almost twice as old as the main characters in Shampoo Planet," observed Victor Dwyer in Maclean's, "he creates in the book a fictional teenage world that is both convincing and highly entertaining."

Comparisons to Coupland's first novel were to be expected. Some reviewers, such as Brian Fawcett in Books in Canada, noted a certain heaviness in both books. "Like its predecessor," wrote Fawcett, "Shampoo Planet is relentlessly witty and sometimes insistently light-headed without ever quite becoming lighthearted." The novel's narrator concludes that "old people will always win," as he finds himself in a world experiencing "severe shopping withdrawal and severe goal withdrawal." Still, Tyler remains hopeful about his future. Coupland himself drew attention to this hopefulness as a difference between his two books. He was quoted in Maclean's as saying: "I'm not Pollyannaish, but I'm optimistic about the future. I think Shampoo Planet has an optimism about it that Generation X does not." Dwyer recognized the same distinction: "It is as though the decade that separates him from his latest crop of characters has provided Coupland with a sense of perspective, and levity, that was sometimes lacking in the often bleak, self-absorbed Generation X."

Time contributor Gregory suggested that Coupland's narrative in Shampoo Planet lacks motivation, but she praised the author's quirky descriptive passages, noting that "the book thrives with the energetically bizarre." Gregory further observed: "Fascinating characters abound, but unfortunately they have little to do." Other critics hailed the book's fresh viewpoint and inventiveness. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the novel "funny, sympathetic, and offhandedly brilliant." Dwyer assessed Coupland as "a maturing author artfully evoking the hopes and dreams of a generation that has good reason to have little of either."

Describing Coupland's 1994 collection of short fiction and essays, Life after God, Joe Chidley asserted in Maclean's that the book "strips away the paraphernalia of an age-group to investigate the origins of its angst. Unfortunately, he also strips away much of its anger and wit. What remains is the ennui." Terry Horton drew a similar conclusion in a Quill & Quire review. "Coupland has a knack for beautiful imagery … and each chapter's first page is topped with a lighthearted cartoon," wrote the reviewer. "But, in the end, neither beautiful imagery nor cartoons can sweep away the hopelessness that darkens these tales." Chidley further observed that, "cumulatively, eight stories about the passing of things end up sounding like an extended whine."

Brenda Peterson, reviewing Life after God in the New York Times Book Review, found that Coupland's effort missed the mark. "Though each of these very short tales has its own narrator, the voice never really varies: it drones where it might delve, it skims where it might seduce, it hoards where it might offer sustenance." Peterson concluded: "Mr. Coupland's vision is as perishable and trendy as the brand names that pass here for characters and story lines."

Coupland's 1995 novel, Microserfs, again explores the lives of the generation of young men and women in their twenties. However, the characters at the center of this novel are not mourning the hopelessness of their McWorld; they are young computer programmers hyperactively engaged in realizing the hopes of Bill Gates and his MicrosoftWorld. New Statesman reviewer Peter Jukes suggested that Coupland has created "perhaps the first great work of cyberrealism. Where others are obsessed by pixels and bits, Coupland's subject is the ‘biomass’ squeezed between the silicon, the ‘carbon-based forms’ that still sweat, flake away, love, grieve and fail." He added: "Microserfs is a tough and raucous celebration of our ability to reinvent and remember ourselves. And it paints a vivid picture of the new geek priesthood, sitting like monks in their VDU-lit cells, embellishing the margins with hieroglyphs, keeping our culture alive."

The novel's "main characters are all highly observant, introspective, and almost painfully ironic," noted Dan Bortolotti in review of Microserfs for Books in Canada. "They are, in fact, like most of Coupland's characters: coldly viewing themselves in terms of consumer culture." Daniel, the narrator, and his friends share a house where they pass the few moments they are not working at Microsoft. They eat poorly, sleep rarely, and exercise only their brains. They think and speak in terms of popular culture, defining themselves by their ideal Jeopardy categories. "Microserfs is entertaining," Nadia Halim commented in Canadian Forum. "Coupland's skill at manipulating his pop-culture-reference-laden vocabulary remains as strong as ever. He is capable of producing passages that are funny, provocative and sublime all in the same breath." Even so, Halim found that "Coupland's weaknesses … are also on display here. The book's plot is banal: after a few predictable crises, everyone falls in love and lives happily ever after. The characters all talk the same way."

Such reservations notwithstanding, reviewers such as New York magazine contributor John Homans pointed out that Coupland is "a journalist … and Microserfs is a giant, frightening collage, a novel of half-baked ideas about change and technology and obsolescence." Rick Perlstein touched on this quality of the novel and its author's role as a chronicler of social change. He wrote in Nation: "Coupland here is mining urgent territory—a new social realism for the dawn of Postindustry and its unholy trinity of data, downsizing and Darwinism. He's investigating a curious sociological quirk of our age: What happens when the very cultural imagination of a society, nay, the very cultural imagination of a planet, is chartered by an elite of preternaturally gifted computer geeks who play with Nerf toys?"

Girlfriend in a Coma, with a title borrowed from 1980s British pop band The Smiths, combines a family drama with a post-apocalyptic story rife with irony. In 1979, high school senior Karen McNeil falls into a coma after mixing alcohol and drugs. Her friends, including hapless boyfriend Richard, best girlfriend Pam, the goofy Hamilton, intellectual Wendy, and science-minded Linus, are devastated at Karen's fate. The lives of Karen and her friends become even more complicated when it is discovered that Karen is pregnant, having had sex for the first time with Richard mere hours before languishing into her coma. Seventeen years later, Karen unexpectedly awakens and suddenly finds herself facing a world decidedly different from the one she remembers from 1979. Her friends have grown into their thirties and assumed their careers, only to become burdened by the trackless monotony of their generation, consumed by hopelessness, and numbed by drugs and alcohol. "One achievement of the novel, a Coupland specialty, is to depict this depressing and impaired existence in a fashion that delicately balances the pitiful and the amusing," noted a Time International reviewer. In the background, Karen cannot fathom how to deal with her teenage daughter Meaghan, who lives with Karen's unpleasant and shallow mother. With apocalyptic suddenness, doom invades the characters' already pained and grim world as a worldwide plague descends and kills everyone but the small clique of Karen and Richard's friends. With the assistance of Jared, the ghost of a high school friend and football player who died of leukemia while still in school, the group sets about trying to understand what happened and to define their role in a devastated world. Given their history, however, even the chance to remake the world might be squandered.

"Coupland writes with a blend of dark comical wit and stark realism that can potentially be quite disturbing," observed a reviewer in Resource Links. In his assessment the novel, New Statesman reviewer James Urquhart observed: "Coupland has picked up a reputation for tuning into the zeitgeist, but he's better than that: he articulates it." With this novel, Coupland "remains dead-on in his satiric depiction of popculture at its most glib," commented a Publishers Weekly critic. People reviewer Anthony Duignan-Cabrera called Girlfriend in a Coma Coupland's "strongest novel to date," while Booklist writer Benjamin Segedin deemed it "immensely readable."

Coupland's 2000 novel, Miss Wyoming, revolves around Susan Colgate. Crowned Miss Wyoming as a teen, Susan rebels against her mother, Marilyn, by refusing the crown. She then makes her way to Hollywood where she has a brief acting career on a television sitcom. After a series of further adventures, including surviving a plane crash, Susan disappears and is sought after by a group that includes her suitor John Johnson, who is disappointed that Susan has gone missing before their second date.

"A little edge or satire might have made it more interesting," claimed Marc A. Kloszewski in Library Journal, adding, "but this is lightweight fun that will find some receptive readers." Though a Publishers Weekly critic found the plot twists to be satisfying, the same critic also stated: "Since Generation X, Coupland has been read more for his trend-setting insights than his novelistic dexterity. [Here] he loses even that edge by jumping on the already tired beauty-pageant-bashing bandwagon." A Mother Jones critic, however, argued that Miss Wyoming "presents a refreshingly earnest theme: The shells we create by discarding outdated identities allow ‘newer and more wonderful’ selves to emerge." Andrew Clark in Maclean's compared Coupland to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Miss Wyoming to The Great Gatsby. In an interview with Observer writer Andrew Anthony, Coupland himself described Miss Wyoming and the following novel, All Families Are Psychotic, as "‘experiments’ that did not quite work."

All Families Are Psychotic, described as "a disorientating cacophony of conflicting voices and ricocheting sub-plots" by Manchester Guardian critic Alfred Hickling, follows the intricate relationships of the Drummond family, who are converging on Florida to see their one-armed sister off on a flight into space. Marcel D'Agneau in a Hackwriters review begins by readying himself to part ways with Coupland over the book, but then follows 9/11 and several disastrous contortions within his own family, and All Families Are Psychotic begins to seem more realistic. "One week of family trauma, hysteria and pain. I came back to All Families Are Psychotic and what a week before was improbable magic realism set in a tawdry Florida backdrop with a classic modern North American family in self destruct … seemed well … normal." However, D'Agneau still did not find the book riveting or different enough from the two novels that preceded it to satisfy him: "All Families Are Psychotic isn't a bad book, it isn't a great book, it is just more of the same and maybe it is my fault for being so familiar with his work I now demand something fresh."

Hey, Nostradamus! was described by Hickling as "a major shift in Coupland's style." Hickling added: "He has toned down all the arch, ironic posturing and compulsive slew of pop-cultural references, allowing a newly meditative, moral tone to emerge." This 2003 novel is Coupland's look at the lengthy and bitter aftermath of a Columbine High School-type massacre. Observer reviewer Anthony, in an interview-style review, revealed that Coupland was drawn to contemplate what had happened at Columbine "in December 2001 after a ‘nightmarish forty-city tour that began on 10 September.’ He talks about the ‘collective sorrow’ he witnessed and I gather that it was this experience, the fall-out from 11 September, that made him look again at Columbine."

The school that provides the setting for the tragedy is in Vancouver, not in the United States, but the characters (Coupland focuses on the victims, not the perpetrators) experience similar problems of alienation and dysfunction both before and after the killing. A young student, Cheryl, secretly married and pregnant, is the last victim and the first narrator. She speaks from an ambiguous limbo between earth and the beyond, from a place detached enough that she can meditate and comment on what has happened, and the resulting calmness of description makes for a harrowing beginning to the book. At the point of her death in her seventeen-year-old husband's arms, he takes over the narrative, and the story continues with his inability to escape the trauma until his ultimate disappearance. The depressing realities Coupland confronts have labeled him "increasingly morbid," but Anthony commented: "He's been described as an ‘optimist obsessed with apocalypse,’ but one might just as easily conclude he's a pessimist preoccupied with redemption."

Hickling pointed out that the cacophony of voices in the two earlier novels is replaced by a clear division between four narrators: Cheryl; her husband, Jason; Heather, the woman who later tries to help him heal; and Reg, Jason's father, "a granite-hard religious fanatic who tortures his family with his twisted strain of spiritual sadism." And Anthony confirmed that the voices of the characters in this novel are more clearly their own, not just a reflection of the author's: "One criticism that might be made of Coupland's work is that there isn't enough delineation between his characters' voices. They often blend into one voice, that of Coupland himself. Notwithstanding some minor lapses, that is not a complaint that could be leveled at Hey, Nostradamus!"

Answering Anthony's questions about why he chose to focus on the victims of the shooting rather than the killers, Coupland responded: "To my mind, that was all people talked about. I'm very much a fan of J.G. Ballard, where you have people in this fantastically quotidian situation that goes suddenly wrong, and how people deal with that. Killers get too much press already."

Liz Dunn, the overweight and perpetually solitary protagonist of Eleanor Rigby, is well acquainted with the miseries of loneliness. Though she is approaching middle age and is intelligent, blessed with a rich sense of humor, and reasonably affluent, Liz has resigned herself to an existence by herself, without the companionship of good friend or lover. In the book, she discovers that she has a twenty-year-old son named Jeremy, the progeny of a one-night-stand she had during a high school trip to Rome two decades before. Jeremy suffers from multiple sclerosis and the effects of too much drug abuse, but he is a captivating young man with good looks and plenty of charm. Liz immediately welcomes him back into her life and assumes responsibility for him, providing him as much care and comfort as she can muster. Soon, Liz's drab personality and outlook begin to change, becoming more and more positive as she learns what it means to love and care for another human being. As the story progresses, Liz must travel to Vienna, where she meets Jeremy's father (and doesn't remember his name). Her international adventures cause political turmoil and even land her in jail, but nothing can shake the newfound hope and happiness she has gathered from her reunion with her troubled son. A Kirkus Reviews contributor mused that the book is "extremely funny yet quite moving (and even plausible): could be one of the first great novels of the new century." In a review in Publishers Weekly, a critic called the novel a "clever, inspired, brilliantly strange tale." Booklist reviewer Donna Seaman noted that Liz's "unhappy youth, self-deprecation, and toughness will appeal to sensitive teens, as will Jeremy's craziness and valor."

In JPod, Coupland revisits the technological wasteland he evoked in Microserfs. This time, his high-tech protagonists are game designers at a Vancouver software company, all of whom have a last name beginning with the letter "J." The characters work clustered together in a grouping of cubicles referred to as JPod, so identified because of the symmetry of their names. Main protagonist Ethan Jarlewski puts in long hours at his game programming job, though most of his time is spent avoiding work rather than actually putting together the product he's been working on for months. Ethan and his co-workers resist when they become the target of illogical corporate whims who want a "hip and edgy" turtle character added, at considerable effort, to the game. In response, they add a hidden subversive level to the game, where a familiar iconic fast-food clown goes on a murderous rampage. Meanwhile, Ethan has to help his pot-growing mom bury a biker customer she accidentally electrocuted in her basement marijuana farm. Ethan's father, frequently an extra in films, pursues ballroom dancing and longs for even a small speaking part. His brother, a real estate salesman, gets involved with Chinese gangster and human smuggler Kam Fong. And, in more than one instance, Ethan gets assistance from an obnoxious writer named Douglas Coupland, who helps Ethan out when no one else seems able. Seeking distraction in pornographic sites, intricate mathematical brainteasers, and the most trivial of pursuits, Ethan and his colleagues search for meaning in a world where significance cannot be programmed, surfed, or manufactured.

Seaman, in another Booklist review, called the novel a "zeitgeist-trawling satire about twenty-first-century cyber obsession." Coupland "derives his satirical, spirited humor's energy from the silly, strung-together plot and thin characters," commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. Dave Itzkoff, writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that "when it works, JPod is a sleek and necessary device: the finely tuned output of an author whose obsolescence is thankfully years away." Seaman summarized Coupland's message this way: no matter how enticing and seductive the virtual world may be, "it is real life that requires our keenest attention."

Coupland has been lauded by some as an accurate and keen observer, the voice of his generation, and a seer; by others, he has been faulted as a gloomsayer who only scratches surfaces. Yet, according to Jay McInerney in the New York Times Book Review, "Douglas Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with a fidelity that should shame most professional Zeitgeist chasers."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 85, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, February 1, 2005, Alonso Duralde, "All the Lonely People: Artist and Generation X Novelist Douglas Coupland Talks about Disaster Movies, Google, and His New Book, Eleanor Rigby. Oh, and He Comes Out," p. 56; June 20, 2006, Alonso Duralde, "Search This: Douglas Coupland Returns with a Hilarious New Novel That Explores Tech Culture, Ronald McDonald, Lesbian Separatists, and the Nightmare of Being Googled," p. 122.

American Review of Canadian Studies, September 22, 2001, Jefferson Faye, "Review Essay: Canada in a Coma," p. 501.

Beaver: Exploring Canada's History, August 1, 2005, review of Terry: The Life of Canadian Terry Fox, p. 47.

Booklist, February 1, 1998, Benjamin Segedin, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 876; November 15, 2004, Donna Seaman, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 560; April 15, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of JPod, p. 26.

Bookseller, April 1, 2005, "Coupland Exits HC for Bloomsbury," p. 9.

Books in Canada, September, 1991, review of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, p. 50; April, 1992, review of Generation X, p. 13; October, 1992, review of Shampoo Planet; September, 1995, review of Microserfs, p. 30.

Bookwatch, June, 2005, review of Souvenir of Canada 2.

C: International Contemporary Art, spring, 2004, "The Basement Show: Angela Grossmann, Douglas Coupland, Derek Root, Graham Gilmore, and Attila Richard Lukacs," p. 48.

Canadian Forum, January, 1993, Glen McGregor, review of Shampoo Planet, p. 41; June, 1994, Alex Pugsley, review of Life after God, p. 44; December, 1995, Nadia Halim, review of Microserfs, p. 50.

Christian Century, November 8, 2000, J. Brent Bill, "Loneliness Virus," critical essay on Douglas Coupland, p. 1150.

CNW Group, January 16, 2006, "Impassioned Canadian Artist, Douglas Coupland, Commissioned to Design Eight-Acre Urban Park at Concord CityPlace."

Entertainment Weekly, October 26, 2001, Glenn Gaslin, "Eclectic Company: Douglas Coupland's Online Gallery," p. 127; December 24, 2004, Jennifer Reese, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 74.

Financial Times, November 15, 2003, Ravi Mattu, "The Books That Matter to Douglas Coupland: This Writer Who Dreamed Up Generation X Has a Penchant for Japanese Flower Arranging and Andy Warhol," p. 46; July 8, 2006, David Morrison, "Fiction: Nerd Instinct—Generation X's Creator Captures the Lives of a New Batch of Alienated Technoslackers, but Is His Heavy Irony Becoming a Little Rusty?" review of JPod, p. 32.

Guardian (London, England), September 8, 2001, Alfred Hickling, review of All Families Are Psychotic; September 13, 2003, Alfred Hickling, "Let's Get Serious," review of Hey, Nostradamus!

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2004, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 975; February 15, 2006, review of JPod, p. 145.

Library Journal, May 1, 1998, David Keymer, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 136; October 1, 1999, Marc A. Kloszewski, review of Miss Wyoming, p. 132; December 1, 2004, Kevin Greczek, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 98.

Maclean's, August 24, 1992, review of Shampoo Planet, p. 60; April 25, 1994, Joe Chidley, review of Life after God, p. 62; June 26, 1995, Justin Smallbridge, review of Microserfs, p. 54; April 20, 1998, "Life after Irony," profile of Douglas Coupland, p. 61; January 17, 2000, Andrew Clark, "Finding True Love in L.A.: Douglas Coupland Gets Unapologetically Romantic," p. 60.

Mother Jones, January, 2000, review of Miss Wyoming, p. 88.

Nation, June 26, 1995, Rick Perlstein, review of Microserfs, p. 934.

New Statesman, May 29, 1992, John Williams, review of Generation X, p. 40; July 29, 1994, Guy Mannes-Abbott, review of Life after God, p. 39; November 10, 1995, Peter Jukes, "I Sing the Body Electric: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier," p. 37; July 10, 1998, James Urquhart, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 48; June 12, 2006, Tim Adams, "White Noise," review of JPod, p. 65.

Newsweek, January 27, 1992, John Leland, review of Generation X, p. 58; June 19, 1995, review of Microserfs, p. 12.

New York, June 5, 1995, John Homans, review of Microserfs, p. 50.

New York Times, September 9, 2001, Phil Patton, "Escape from GenX," profile of Douglas Coupland, p. 3.

New York Times Book Review, May 8, 1994, Brenda Peterson, review of Life after God, p. 13; June 11, 1995, Jay McInerney, review of Microserfs, p. 54; January 2, 2005, Emily Nussbaum, "All the Lonely People," review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 11; May 21, 2006, Dave Itzkoff, "Insert: Headline/jpodcoupland. rvw," review of JPod, p. 24.

Observer (London, England), August 7, 1994, review of Life after God, p. 22; August 24, 2003, Andrew Anthony, "Close to the Edge," profile of Douglas Coupland.

People, October 14, 1991, Michael Neill and Nancy Matsumoto, "X Marks the Angst," review of Generation X, p. 105; August 5, 1996, Lan N. Nguyen, review of Polaroids from the Dead, p. 31; April 13, 1998, Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 31; January 24, 2005, Kyle Smith, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 49.

Presbyterian Record, July-August, 2000, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 46.

Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1991, Penny Kaganoff, review of Generation X, p. 77; June 15, 1992, review of Shampoo Planet, p. 82; December 20, 1993, review of Life after God, p. 48; May 13, 1996, review of Polaroids from the Dead, p. 66; January 26, 1998, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 68; October 11, 1999, review of Miss Wyoming, p. 51; November 15, 2004, John D. Thomas, "All the Lonely People," interview with Douglas Coupland, p. 38; November 15, 2004, review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 38; February 20, 2006, review of JPod, p. 130.

Quill & Quire, February, 1994, review of Life after God, p. 24; May, 1995, review of Microserfs, p. 7; July, 1995, review of Microserfs, p. 51; May, 1996, review of Polaroids from the Dead, p. 1.

Report Newsmagazine, December 2, 2002, Jeremy Lott, "Canada from A to Zed; A Vancouver Native Writes about His Homeland and His Fear of the U.S.," review of Souvenir of Canada.

Resource Links, June 1, 1997, review of Polaroids from the Dead, p. 233; October, 1998, review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 12.

Saturday Night, March, 1994, John Fraser, "The Dalai Lama of Generation X," profile of Douglas Coupland, p. 8; December 1, 1999, Frank Moher, "The X Factor," review of Miss Wyoming, p. 14.

Spectator, October 9, 2004, Jonathan Keates, "A Slave of Solitude," review of Eleanor Rigby, p. 48; June 17, 2006, William Brett, "Nailing the Zeitgeist," review of JPod.

Time, October 19, 1992, Sophfronia Scott Gregory, review of Generation X, p. 78; January 17, 2000, James Poniewozik, "They're Ripley in Reverse: Douglas Coupland Crafts a Mystery of Celebrity," p. 93.

Time International, April 27, 1998, "Coma Chameleon," review of Girlfriend in a Coma, p. 63.

Toronto Life, August 1, 2004, Betty Ann Jordan, "National Treasure," profile of Douglas Coupland, p. 34.

ONLINE

Bookslut,http://www.bookslut.com/ (August 5, 2007), Sumana Harihareswara, review of Eleanor Rigby.

Douglas Coupland Home Page,http://www.coupland.com (August 5, 2007).

Hackwriters.com: The International Writer's Magazine,http://www.hackwriters.com/ (August 5, 2007), Marcel D'Agneau, review of All Families Are Psychotic.

JPod Web site,http://www.jpod.info (August 5, 2007).

SpikeMagazine.com,http://www.spikemagazine.com/ (August 5, 2007), Chris Mitchell, interview with Douglas Coupland.

OTHER

Douglas Coupland: Close Personal Friend (short film), profile of Douglas Coupland, 1995.