Big Riot - Softcover

DOUGLAS COUPLAND is a Canadian visual artist, writer and designer. His first novel was the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, eight non-fiction books and a number of dramatic and comedic works for stage, film and TV. In 2014, Coupland had his first major solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, after which the show toured to Toronto, and then internationally. His most recent book, Kitten Clone, was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-fiction. Coupland is a contributor to the New York Times, e-flux journal, Artsy and Vice online and is a columnist with the Financial Times of London. Since 2015 he has been artist-in-residence at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. Visit coupland.com and follow him @DougCoupland. The author lives in Vancouver, BC.

“Bit Rot offers priceless insights. . . . Few people are better [than Coupland] at explaining the ramifications of the digital era.” —BBC Culture

“An eclectic and thought-provoking collection of ephemera from Coupland. . . . This substantial collection of more than sixty-five stories and essays reveals the breadth and depth of Coupland’s writing. . . . A surprisingly personal meander around the mind of Generation X’s elder statesman.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Coupland’s collection is—like much of his work—a unique appraisal of modern culture, addressing technology, religion, death, violence, love and the environment. . . . The book’s nonlinearity is liberating. Jumping between philosophical musings on memory and comedic anecdotes about visiting the mall, Bit Rot sits somewhere between a string of TED talks and a three-hour binge of “recommended for you” Netflix choices. . . . Coupland’s fascination with recalling life before the digital age is telling. If, indeed, it is possible to distill the writer’s eclectic collection, woven throughout the book is one main theme: the precarious dichotomy between the organic and the technological. . . . Despite exploring the delights and perils of technology in thoughtful and witty detail, however, Coupland offers no value judgments about our increasingly automated world. A humorist and observer, he takes the temperature of the present instead of trying to change it.” —The Georgia Straight

“Highlights of the collection include ‘Grexit,’ which explores not only the collapse of the Greek economy, but also utopias . . . the incipient disappearance of the middle class on a global scale, and the notion of leisure. . . . While societal shifts are one of the main concerns of the collection, some of the stronger pieces in Bit Rot are defiantly personal. ‘Coffee & Cigarettes’ is a delightful, fragmentary account of compulsion from a writer who quit smoking more than twenty years ago . . . while ‘Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-First Century’ is . . . just as unsettling and vaguely disheartening as one might imagine. . . . Other pieces . . . create a dizzying moment of dislocation: as you start reading a piece, you are unsure whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, whether it can be ‘trusted’ or not. It’s an unsettling moment, a recurring and unavoidable dialectic over the nature of authority and ‘authority,’ the sort of intellectual jamming in which Coupland excels. . . . [O]ne of our most valuable social commentators . . . whose voice is undiminished after more than a quarter century in the cultural spotlight . . . [as well as] a writer, thinker and artist utterly perfect of and for his time.” —National Post

“Fans of Coupland’s cheeky, time-mashing, brand-conscious prose will find this book a rollicking read with just enough doses of the surreal.” —Quill and Quire

“His approach to the world has always been one that inspired thoughtful engagement with ideas. In this way, Bit Rot highlights something we see very rarely in our culture, the act of creatively questioning. . . . Overall, Douglas Coupland’s new book Bit Rot brings fans the best of all the Coupland worlds.” —Geek Dad (blog)
PRAISE FOR DOUGLAS COUPLAND:

“Author and artist Douglas Coupland is pretty much the man—if you haven’t read any of his books, well, just consider them plugged.” —Techly

“He’s still iconic, twenty-five years after making his name.” —Torontoist

“Coupland is one of the country’s most prominent, prolific and popular artists.” —The Province

“Douglas Coupland is the closest thing we have to a Renaissance man. . . . His writing has inspired legions of devoted fans, all of them looking to him to interpret their relationship to technology, religion, the environment, love, death, work, play, violence, and popular culture.” —The Georgia Straight

“There are few authors who could be called the voice of a generation, but the tag fits Douglas Coupland—not only because he literally wrote the book Generation X, but for the way his prose oozes the irony and dark humor that define his peer group.” —Salon

“Douglas Coupland is Canada’s official Cool Guy. . . . He simply, humbly, writes, sculpts, designs and collates from his base in Vancouver, telling us about our country and about the world as it’s currently lived in. He works hard and produces material constantly. It’s a fortunate thing that one of our culture’s closest and most versatile observers is also one of its exemplars.” —Metro News  

"All . . . of his novels have glittered with his inexhaustible, magpie’s eye for the shiny, banal ephemera of modern life—much of it overshadowed by the prospect of impending global doom. His books feel tailor-made for the grunge generation: full of bored, overstimulated anomie, yet sparkling with endlessly chatty, deliciously readable observation.” —The Sunday Times

“Unremittingly famous for defining a generation, Douglas Coupland is, himself, a creative whirl.” —The New York Times