All Families are Psychotic - Brossura

Praise for All Families Are Psychotic

"[All Families Are Psychotic] works because Coupland writes as sweetly and cleanly as a vapour trail." —Elle Canada

"[Douglas Coupland’s] focus is always on the moral implications, on human relationships and feelings. There is an almost spiritual aspect to his work that makes it emotionally compelling, and redemption is always at hand to pull his vision back from the brink of apocalypse. But more important perhaps, Coupland can write beautifully. . . . we shouldn’t ignore writers like Coupland who have vision and a thing or two to say. . . . Coincidence features heavily, there is the usual cast of zany characters, an outlandish series of events, the signature cynicism and wry humour - and transcendent moments of epiphany. . . . Coupland Country is ultimately a funny, quirky, compassionate and forgiving place to inhabit.” —Toronto Star

"With All Families Are Psychotic author Douglas Coupland has completed a seven-novel mission: he’s finally moved his characters out of the rumpus room. . . . offers a better view of our glittering, behemoth spaceship Earth than most offerings by the usual literary crowd. . . . Coupland ought to be our guide to today’s chilled, illed psychonauts of inner and outer space." —Quill & Quire

"There is wit à la early Pynchon or McGuane or Elmore Leonard, and the story does hum along - amazing twists and turns, snappy dialogue, meditations on the future, on postwar concerns: technology, feminism, consumerism, crime, junk culture, genetics." —The Globe and Mail

"Subtly subversive." —Georgia Straight

"As rich as an ovenful of fresh-baked brownies and twice as nutty. . . . Everyone with a strange family — that is, everyone with a family - will laugh knowingly at the feuding, conducted with a maestro’s ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of humanity. Coupland, once the wise guy of Generation X, has become a wise man." —People Magazine

"[Douglas Coupland] has ventured past his trademark satirical style to write an outright farce. . . . [He] has written what is probably his best novel to date. . . . The intricate pacing [is] more like 17th-century drama — John Webster, Ben Jonson or Molière — than slacker sitcom, which is truly a revelation. . . ." —L.A. Weekly

"Although the Drummonds appear to be self-destructing, author Coupland reveals himself to be, somewhat surprisingly, an optimist. For him, the new millennium is an era full of promise and potential miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world." —Booklist

"Taking whacks at Florida is a bit like shooting a whale in a barrel, but Coupland does it with precision and originality. . . . vivid and true." —Washington Post

"True to Coupland's style, the book reads lightning fast. The author punctuates his narrative with clipped dialogue and punchy exchanges that advance the palpable sense of unease and tension running throughout. . . . The entire book brews and builds like a roiling tropical storm." —Amazon.com

"Chirpy, bright and strenuously zany." —The New York Times

"Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers (the ones who religiously watch Cops for the laughs) totally amused.” —Publishers Weekly

“It seemed paradoxical that a writer so revered for his hipness resembled, in practice, nobody so much as Jane Austen.... In the resultant unravelling there isn’t a boring page.” —The Literary Review

“He gets beneath their skin, convincing us that their lives of Gothic chaos contain their own perverse logic – a postmodern take on Tolstoy’s maxim that ‘all unhappy families are alike in their unhappiness.’ For a writer so immersed in the slippery textures of our time, Coupland reveals old-fashioned concern for the nature of our social interaction. He questions why we value what we do, and the price we pay to get it. He confronts our imprisoning luxury, with its Faustian freedoms. His hi-tech flights of fancy conceal a baffled humanist; one who echoes G. K. Chesterton’s remark that ‘people are much more eccentric than they are meant to be.’” —Sunday Express

“Coupland manages to balance the more weighty strands of the story with an absurdly satirical vision, without compromising either. At the same time, he mines the present with such intensity that it seems like science fiction. This strange, often miraculous fusion has you laughing, thinking and crying all at once, and suggests that Coupland’s writing is becoming more mature than ever.” —Evening Standard

“The most frightening element of the novel gives the lie to the truth of its title. Fantastic characters and a beyond-belief plot are insurance policies for white knuckles all the way, punctuated with belly laughs.” —i-D Magazine

"...being broken is a way of being together. Despite the meltdown of the family, this book lets us know that we don’t need to worry. . . . Coupland’s novel is ultimately optimistic. Like Anne Tyler, he intertwines the garish and unmeaning events he describes with a thread of hope, sometimes contained in a reminiscence of childhood, sometimes projected into a possible future. . . . Coupland presents us with a heroine rising above the mess of modern America, an honestly trusting person moving through the downbeat style and the defeated, disconnected world of modern America." —Times Literary Supplement

“[Douglas Coupland] is on an incredible creative roll. His last four novels . . . are so good and so distinctive that they seem to me to mark a genuine seismic shift in the literary landscape. Could it be that not everyone is as convinced of Coupland’s brilliance as I am? . . . . This is high melodrama: divorce, dysfunction, inter-generational sex, marital infidelity, life-threatening illnesses (everyone has at least one) and spacemen. But Coupland does not tell it in the florid, intense style of the melodrama queen. The tone is rather cool and slow, almost like a song played a beat behind the bar. . . . sophisticated . . . dreamlike.” [full review also compares Doug to Martin Amis and Haruki Murakami] —The New Statesman

“Coupland has been growing stronger with each subsequent book and has since Girlfriend In A Coma been making his pitch for best young writer in America (despite being born and brought up in Canada's Vancouver) —The Sunday Herald

Praise for Douglas Coupland

“Reading his increasingly assured prose is like watching a teen idol take on Hamlet and pull it off.” —Toronto Life

“The self-wrought oracle of our age.” —Saturday Night

“Douglas Coupland continues to register the buzz of his generation with a fidelity that should shame most professional Zeitgeist chasers." —Jay McInerney, The New York Times Book Review

Miss Wyoming
“Equal parts love story and absurdist parable, it seamlessly meshes Coupland’s trademark ironic detachment with an unapologetic romanticism that has been absent from his previous work. The intelligence and humour of Coupland’s prose engages the mind while the unabashed yearning of his characters hooks the heart.” —Maclean’s

Girlfriend in a Coma
“To call Coupland the John Bunyan of his set would not be hyperbole.... Girlfriend approaches an eccentric jeremiad worthy of Kurt Vonnegut.” —The Washington Post

Polaroids from the Dead
“He bravely commits himself to material that is rich and deeply felt.” —The New York Times

Microserfs
"The novel’s real fun is in the frequent and rapidly fired pop-culture references that spin the ’70s, ’80s, and ‘90s ... and Coupland uses them with relish.” —Entertainment Weekly

Life After God
“Coupland has at his disposal a dazzling array of tools with which to shape the emotions of his readers: the whimsy of a latter-day Jack Kerouac, the irony of a young Kurt Vonnegut, the poignancy of early John Irving.” —Bookpage

Shampoo Planet
“Having called Coupland's first book a Catcher in the Rye for our time, I repeat myself. Nobody has a better finger on the pulse of the twenty-something generation.” —Cosmopolitan

Generation X
“A groundbreaking novel.” —Los Angeles Times

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian NATO base in Baden-Söllingen, Germany, on December 30, 1961, the third of four boys. When Douglas was four, his family moved to West Vancouver, where he returned to live after years of travelling. “I spent my twenties scouring the globe thinking there had to be a better city out there, until it dawned on me that Vancouver is the best one going.... I can only do three days in New York before I get psychotic and have to leave.” While his books enjoy popularity in the United States, half of his novels take place in Canada and about half of his characters are Canadian.

In addition to winning acclaim as a bestselling novelist, Coupland is also a visual artist and award-winning designer. The moment seven-year-old Douglas discovered James Rosenquist in an encyclopedia, he was destined to be “in the pop world” – by the time he turned ten, all he wanted for Christmas was a Lichtenstein poster. Coupland remembers, “My first day of art school was the first day in my life I could pick up an object and say, ‘That's so beautiful,’ without getting beat up.” He graduated in sculpture from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 1984, with a year spent in Hokkaido, Japan. In 1984 he attended the Instituto Europeo di Design in Milan, then the following year studied at the Japan-America Institute of Management Science in Honolulu, ending up working as a designer in the Tokyo magazine world. Back in Canada in 1987, he showed enough promise as a sculptor to be given a show, “The Floating World,” at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

To pay his studio bills Coupland began writing about art, and soon found he was getting more out of writing than sculpture. Nonetheless, visual art has remained essential to his life. In his book City of Glass, he examines Vancouver’s post-war architecture, and he recently finished an illustrated novel with animator Mike Howatson, to be published in Japan in both paper and “cell-phone format,” a global first. His major art show Spike travels to New York in September. His house is filled with his own art created from such paraphernalia as plastic detergent bottles, and is hemmed in by trees (“I dislike views”). In spite of a reputation for an “acute sensitivity to the highly artificial, consumer-driven, media-soaked details of our environment,” he keeps a Japanese garden and practises the Japanese art of flower arrangement, combing his yard for “something that’s doing something interesting that week.... It’s just a wonderful way of keeping track of the seasons and time.”

Coupland’s writing, which includes short stories, novels, essays and non-fiction, has been translated into 22 languages and published in 30 countries. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Republic, Wallpaper, ArtForum, Wired and Time magazine, offering razor-sharp insights into the pivotal people, places and events that define our modern lives, from Madonna to moon landings to Dolly the cloned sheep. Many of his stories and travel pieces can be read on his extensive Web site, www.coupland.com, along with diaries of his book tours and collages of tickets and newspaper clippings he has accumulated on the road.

It was on the basis of an article and a full-page cartoon strip he had written for magazines that a New York publisher commissioned him to write a non-fiction guide to the lost post-baby-boom Generation X. He moved to Palm Springs, California, spent the advance money and wrote a novel instead. In the winter of 1991, at the age of 29, he waited for the book’s publication, broke and living in a basement apartment in snowbound Montreal. In spite of some false starts, Generation X became a word-of-mouth cult success, eventually selling over a million copies. “But there’s this other parallel universe out there where it didn’t work out, and it always keeps me a little bit humble,” Coupland says. “That alternate universe where I’m still living on hot dogs and oatmeal.”

The book depicts three people in their twenties, overeducated, underemployed and full of doubts. They leave their empty lives in the city and move to Palm Springs, where they work at low-paying ”McJobs.” The novel’s success earned Coupland a reputation as the voice of a generation, but that title has always seemed inaccurate to him: “I speak for myself.” In fact, his characters have ranged from the optimistic Global Teens of Shampoo Planet raised on computers and music videos; to the computer geeks of Microserfs, Microsoft employees who quit their jobs to move to California to start their own software company and pursue a better life; and even to the used-up Hollywood types of Miss Wyoming, striving to exchange their accelerated, alienated lives for something more meaningful and redeeming. If there is an abiding theme in Coupland’s work, it might be described as the soullessness of our society and the human yearning to rise above it.

Film rights to All Families Are Psychotic have been purchased by Single Cell, the production partnership between R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern – both of whom had a hand in the hit film Being John Malkovich. Coupland and Stipe have been friends for a decade. “We're both left-handed art school students from military families. And Capricorn. We just click.” He also recently sold the movie rights to Generation X to the producers of The Virgin Suicides, but his countless encounters with Hollywood producers who have optioned his books without turning any of them into films have left Coupland clear-eyed and free of any illusions about the movie business.
     
In the last few years Coupland switched publishers in order to work more intensively with an editor whose notes he described as reading like a “Russian secret service report on what your neighbours have been saying about you for the past decade”. This is part of a move to get more serious about his writing, and has given him more confidence about where he’s going. He also changed his method of writing. Previously he would go around with a notepad and pen in his pocket and take notes of everything, “and then a year later, chop them all up, like fortune cookie fortunes, and figure out voices and places and ideas and themes.” After years, he’s given up the notebooks: “I just internalized the process.”