COUPLAND, Douglas. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture.

(London): Abacus, 1992.  First UK edition.  Softcover.  23cm by 19.7cm. 183 pages.  Coupland’s classic novel about the generation born from 1960 to 1978-a generation known until then simply as twenty somethings.Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs-‘low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry.’ They create their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.A dark snapshot of the trio’s highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges-peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.  The book launched a tousand-think-tanks and commercial strategies (who are Gen X?, how to sell soda to Gen X, etc.) – so much so that in July 1995 Coupland wrote a ‘death of Gen X’ piece in the US magazine Detailsin an attempt to extricate himself from its aftermath.  A very good copy in wrappers, some spotting to pages.  An important novel.

$35.00

1 in stock

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