Binge
60 stories to make your brain feel different
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
The first new work of fiction since 2013 from one of Canada's most successful, idiosyncratic and world-defining writers, Douglas Coupland. He's called it Binge because it's impossible to read just one.
Imagine feeling 100% alive every moment of every minute of the day! Maybe that's how animals live. Or trees, even. I sometimes stare at the plastic bag tree visible from my apartment window and marvel that both it and I are equally alive and that there's no sliding scale of life. You're either alive, or you're not. Or you're dead or you're not.
Thirty years after Douglas Coupland broke the fiction mould and defined a generation with Generation X, he is back with Binge, 60 stories laced with his observational profundity about the way we live and his existential worry about how we should be living: the very things that have made him such an influential and bestselling writer. Not to mention that he can also be really funny.
Here the narrators vary from story to story as Doug catches what he calls "the voice of the people," inspired by the way we write about ourselves and our experiences in online forums. The characters, of course, are Doug's own: crackpots, cranks and sweetie-pies, dad dancers and perpetrators of carbecues. People in the grip of unconscionable urges; lonely people; dying people; silly people. If you love Doug's fiction, this collection is like rain on the desert.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An alcoholic named Rumwoman, a misfit named Erik, and a neurosurgeon on the skids are just three of the neurotic souls who unload their restlessness in this breezy collection from Coupland (Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture). The 60 narrators candidly unburden themselves in pieces that have the feel of theatrical monologues and in which plots, such as they are, often move with a stream-of-consciousness propulsion, heavy with pop culture references. "Taco Bell" features a sexual encounter in which the seducer seals the deal with a Childish Gambino imitation. In "Thong," Logan makes an inappropriate 9/11 joke and later commits a murder, with passing references to Forever 21 and The Far Side in between. "Craigslist.org" follows a self-proclaimed Bridezilla's depiction of her wedding from hell. Some characters, like hard-partying college student Dean and a drag queen named Trashe Blanche, make multiple cameo appearances. Product placement is everywhere, from the Garfield doll in the opening story to a Toyota Camry in the last. The promise made in the subtitle pays off, and the stories also prove, as a Canadian border guard has it in "Liz Claiborne Sheets," that "any situation can blow up." It's a diverting set of literary appetizers.
