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A thought-provoking, binge-worthy new collection of essays, stories, and musings from Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot explores the different ways in which twentieth-century notions of the future are being shredded, and it is a literary gem of the digital age.
"Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Douglas Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones."
Bit Rot the book is a fascinating meditation on the ways in which humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's established fanbase hungry for his observations about our world, and a revelation to new readers of his work. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, his phrase-making, and his visual art. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise, and delight. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one.
"A surprisingly personal meander around the mind of Generation X's elder statesman." - Kirkus
"[Douglas Coupland's] voice is undiminished after more than a quarter century in the cultural spotlight ... a writer, thinker and artist utterly perfect of and for his time." - National Post (Canada)
"[A] respected futurist, bestselling author, prolific visual artist ... [Bit Rot] is classic Coupland – created intentionally for the Internet age." - The Globe and Mail (Canada)
"A contemporary prophet." - The Sunday Times (UK)
"A shrewd observer of modernity." - The Observer (UK)
"We should really pay attention to Coupland. His eye is so firmly on the ball he's virtually clairvoyant." - The Guardian (UK)
"The current landscape, the mindless and endless landslide of mass culture versus individual vulnerability - no one sees these or gets to the heart of them quite like Coupland." - Ali Smith
"In the future, if people are curious about what it was like to live in our times, in the early twenty-first century, they will do well to read Douglas Coupland." - Yann Martel
This information about Bit Rot was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
D.J.Wier
Douglas Coupland was born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961. He is the author of the international bestsellers Generation A and JPod, and nine other novels, among them The Gum Thief, Hey Nostradamus!, All Families Are Psychotic, Microserfs, and Generation X, along with nonfiction works including a recent short biography of Marshall McLuhan. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages and published in most countries around the world. Coupland, also a visual artist, furniture and fashion designer, and screenwriter, lives and works in Vancouver.
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