Life after God
We are the first generation raised without God. We are creatures with strong religious impulses, yet they have nowhere to flow in this world of malls and TV, Kraft dinners and jets. How do we cope with loneliness? Anxiety? The collapse of relationships?\ How do we reach the quiet, safe layer of our lives? In this compellingly innovative collection of stories, bestselling author Douglas Coupland responds to these themes. Cutting through the hype of modern living to find a rare grace amid our...
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We are the first generation raised without God. We are creatures with strong religious impulses, yet they have nowhere to flow in this world of malls and TV, Kraft dinners and jets. How do we cope with loneliness? Anxiety? The collapse of relationships?How do we reach the quiet, safe layer of our lives? In this compellingly innovative collection of stories, bestselling author Douglas Coupland responds to these themes. Cutting through the hype of modern living to find a rare grace amid our lives, he uncovers a new kind of truth for a culture stuck on fast-forward. A culture seemingly beyond God.Brenda PetersonImagine a sour Prufrock on Prozac, measuring out his 30-odd years in teaspoon-sized stories. This is the monotonic voice brooding over "Life After God," a book of stories by Douglas Coupland. 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. The range of character and emotion is so slight as to be undetectable. Presented with such an unmoving feast, a reader might starve to death....Mr. Coupland's real storytelling may begin when he can wean himself from his willful attachment to the wasteland and to the easy safety of ennui. -- New York times
\ From the PublisherWill Blythe Esquire A revelation...Coupland's most accomplished fiction to date...suffused with a mystery and regret unique in his work.\ The New Criterion Coupland's hipster credentials are...impeccable.\ \ \ \ \ \ Brenda PetersonImagine a sour Prufrock on Prozac, measuring out his 30-odd years in teaspoon-sized stories. This is the monotonic voice brooding over "Life After God," a book of stories by Douglas Coupland. 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. The range of character and emotion is so slight as to be undetectable. Presented with such an unmoving feast, a reader might starve to death....Mr. Coupland's real storytelling may begin when he can wean himself from his willful attachment to the wasteland and to the easy safety of ennui. -- New York times\ \ \ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ Coupland's Generation X and Shampoo Planet explored the ennui of a generation of young adults, reared on a promiscuous diet of mass culture, who regard politics, sex, the job market, global events and religion with the same degree of ironic apathy. His new collection of stories offers variations on that same theme, a series of loosely connected, escapist adventures in which a 30-year-old narrator flees a middling job and hits the road in quest of authentic spiritual experience, reflecting with mixed nostalgia and despair upon past events, from his insular suburban upbringing to his recently dissolved marriage. In the opening story, ``Little Creatures,'' the narrator, harassed by legal troubles and recriminating phone calls from his ex-wife, accompanies his young daughter on a car trip north from Vancouver into a primeval landscape enveloped in snow. After his car conks out in a desolate stretch of Nevada, the protagonist of ``In the Desert'' meets a wizened vagrant who feeds him cold fast-food before vanishing without a trace, leaving the narrator to muse about the transcendent value of ``small acts of mercy.'' Like Generation X , the margins of which held snippets of data and other visual aids, Life After God is illustrated with childlike drawings of cute animals, appliances, barren landscapes, road signs and other symbols, a faux naif touch that underscores Coupland's fetish for lost innocence. Although these tales of escape from the taint of middle-class culture and technology occasionally do strike a note of real feeling, they succeed less as an allegory for a postmodern, post-ironic spiritual life than as an amusing travelogue for jaded, pop-culturally literate couch potatoes. (Mar.)\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalCoupland's novels (e.g., Shampoo Planet, LJ 8/92) appeal to young, confused, and disenfranchised waifs who like to characterize themselves as Generation X. This audiobook features two complete stories selected from the print version and read by the author. In ``One Thousand Years,'' a young man flees to the wilderness in the wake of an existential crisis, while ``Things That Fly'' tells of lost love and the death of Superman. Coupland's endearing Canadian accent will be a welcome change to listeners accustomed to the usual Brit or Yank reader. Yet his monotone delivery, however appropriate to his characters' weary internal ramblings, is at times difficult to savor. For large popular collections.-Mark Annichiarico, ``Library Journal''\ \
