Douglas Coupland - Souvenir of Canada To Highly Inappropriate Tales For Young People

Souvenir of Canada To Highly Inappropriate Tales For Young People

The promotional rounds for All Families are Psychotic were underway when the September 11 attacks took place. In a play called September 10 performed later at Stratford-upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company, Coupland felt that this was the last day of the 1990s, and the new century had now truly begun.

The first book that Coupland published after the September 11 attacks was Souvenir of Canada, which expanded his earlier City of Glass to incorporate the whole of Canada. There are two volumes in this series, which was conceived as an explanation to non-Canadians of uniquely Canadian things.

Coupland's second book in this period, Hey Nostradamus!, describes a fictitious high school shooting similar to the Columbine High School in 1999 Coupland relocates the events to school in North Vancouver, Canada.

Coupland followed Hey Nostradamus! with Eleanor Rigby. Similarly to the titular original written and sung by The Beatles, the novel examines loneliness. The novel received some positive acclaim as a more mature work, a notable example being novelist Ali Smith's review of the book for the Guardian newspaper.

Using the format of City of Glass and Souvenir of Canada, Coupland released a book for the Terry Fox Foundation called Terry. It is a photographic look back on the life of Fox, the result of Coupland's exhaustive research through the Terry Fox archives, including thousands of emotional letters from Canadians written to Fox during his one-legged marathon across Canada on Highway 1.

The third work of fiction in this period, written concurrently with the non-fiction Terry, is another re-envisioning of a previous book. jPod, billed as Microserfs for the Google generation, is his first Web 2.0 novel. The text of jPod recreates the experience of a novel read online on a notebook computer. jPod was a popular success, giving rise to a CBC Television series for which Coupland wrote the script. The series lasted one season before cancellation.

Coupland's next novel, The Gum Thief, followed jPod in 2007. The Gum Thief was Coupland's first foray into the standard epistolary novel format following the 'laptop diaries'/'blog' formats of Microserfs and jPod.

Coupland published his eleventh novel, Generation A, in late 2009. In terms of style, Generation A "mirrors the structure of 1991's Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world". The novel takes place in the near future, after bees have become extinct, and focuses on five people from around the globe who are connected by being stung.

Coupland's contribution for the 2010 Massey Lectures, as opposed to a standard long essay, was 50,000 word novel entitled Player One – What Is to Become of Us: A Novel in Five Hours. Coupland wrote the novel as five hour-long lectures aired on CBC Radio from Nov. 8–12, 2010. According to Coupland, the novel "...presents a wide array of modes to view the mind, the soul, the body, the future, eternity, technology, and media." and is set "In a B-list Toronto airport hotel’s cocktail lounge in August of 2010."

The lecture/novel was published in its own right on October 7, 2010. House of Anansi Press' advance publicity for the novel stated that "Coupland's 2010 Massey Lecture is a real-time, five-hour story set in an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster. Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end. In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers, and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species – and that there is no turning back." On September 20, 2010, Player One was announced as part of the initial longlist for the 2010 Scotiabank Giller Prize literary award, Coupland's second longlisting for the prize after being longlisted in 2006 with jPod. However, the book didn't make it any further than the longlist and Coupland was denied the honour a second time, with the prize being eventually won by Johanna Skibsrud for her novel The Sentimentalists (novel).

Coupland followed Player One in November 2011 with a second short stories collection in collaboration with the artist Graham Roumieu entitled Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People....Young People was a collection of seven short stories written by Coupland with illustrations provided by Romieu, described by the publisher as "Seven pants-peeingly funny stories featuring seven evil characters you can't help but love". The stories in the collection are 'Donald, the Incredibly Hostile Juice Box'; 'Kevin, the Hobo Minivan with Extremely Low Morals'; 'Brandon, the Action Figure with Issues'; 'Sandra, the Truly Dreadful Babysitter'; 'Hans, the Weird Exchange Student'; 'Cindy, the Terrible Role Model'; and, 'Mr. Fraser, the Undead Substitute Teacher'.

Coupland's next and currently untitled novel (listed as Untitled 2 on Amazon), is due for publication in March 2013.