God Hates Japan

2001

God Hates Japan (神は日本を憎んでる, Kami wa Nihon wo Nikunderu, in Japanese) is a 2001 novel by Douglas Coupland. It was released solely in Japan and has little English text in it. The book was published by Kadokawa Shoten and illustrated by Michael Howatson.

The story focuses on characters lost in the malaise that swept Japanese culture after the burst of the bubble economy in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It also depicts the way some of these characters lived in the shadow of a death cult’s 1995 sarin-gas assault on Tokyo’s subway system.

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City of Glass

2000

“This book arises from both love and laziness: love, because 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; and laziness, because I thought I was going to go mental explaining dim sum, the sulphur pits and Kitsilano for the umpteen-hundredth time.”

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Terry

2005

Terry is a pictorial biography of Terry Fox written by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in 2005 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Fox’s death in 1981.

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Eleanor Rigby

2004

“Death without the possibility of ever changing the world is the same as a life that never was.”

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Hey Nostradamus!

2003

“I am aware that there is a world out there that functions without regard to me. There are wars and budgets and bombings and vast dimensions of wealth and greed and ambition and corruption. And yet I don’t feel a part of that world, and I wouldn’t know how to join if I tried.”

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Player One

2010

“Dark-Age High Tech Technical sophistication is relative. In the eleventh century, people who made steps leading up to their hovel doors were probably mocked as being high tech early adopters.”

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Generation A

2009

“In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.”

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JPod

2006

“The problem is, after a week of intense googling, we’ve started to burn out on knowing the answer to everything. God must feel that way all the time. I think people in the year 2020 are going to be nostalgic for the sensation of feeling clueless.”

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