Douglas Coupland: JPod
Thu, August 25, 2011 6 pm CEST, Reading
The world of »JPod« is flagrant, screwy and dizzyingly rapid. »JPod« is a cuckoo novel about six colleagues holed up in a bizaar games development department, and about the excesses of our contemporary employment world. Douglas Coupland takes a biting, satirical look our 21st century.
Ethan Jarlewski along with five other colleagues versed in popular culture, whose names also begin with »J«, hang out day by day in »JPod« – a hermetically sealed architectonic state of limbo, which is part of a gigantic games design company. The JPodders are in the clinch with their marketing team that torturers them daily with its demands for idiotic games. Meanwhile, privately, Ethan is being kept on the go by various other phenomena, such as homicidal mothers, human trafficking and illegal Chinese immigrants who have occupied his apartment. Douglas Coupland’s work also reveals himself as a satirically sovereign exegete of present-day mass culture.
The German edition of »JPod« is to be published on August 24th, 2011 (Douglas Coupland: JPod, Tropen by Klett-Cotta, transl. from the English by Clara Drechsler and Harald Hellmann, c. 510 pages., bound, c. 22.95€).
Douglas Coupland, born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961, was brought up in Vancouver, where he now lives and works as an author. He began writing for local magazines in the late 1980s. »Generation X«, his first work which propelled him into overnight fame and made him the mouthpiece of a generation, was published in 1991. His biography of »Marshall McLuhan« was published in spring 2011 (Verlag Tropen at Klett-Cotta; available at the ZKM | Museum Shop, €18.95).
Ethan Jarlewski along with five other colleagues versed in popular culture, whose names also begin with »J«, hang out day by day in »JPod« – a hermetically sealed architectonic state of limbo, which is part of a gigantic games design company. The JPodders are in the clinch with their marketing team that torturers them daily with its demands for idiotic games. Meanwhile, privately, Ethan is being kept on the go by various other phenomena, such as homicidal mothers, human trafficking and illegal Chinese immigrants who have occupied his apartment. Douglas Coupland’s work also reveals himself as a satirically sovereign exegete of present-day mass culture.
The German edition of »JPod« is to be published on August 24th, 2011 (Douglas Coupland: JPod, Tropen by Klett-Cotta, transl. from the English by Clara Drechsler and Harald Hellmann, c. 510 pages., bound, c. 22.95€).
Douglas Coupland, born on a NATO base in Germany in 1961, was brought up in Vancouver, where he now lives and works as an author. He began writing for local magazines in the late 1980s. »Generation X«, his first work which propelled him into overnight fame and made him the mouthpiece of a generation, was published in 1991. His biography of »Marshall McLuhan« was published in spring 2011 (Verlag Tropen at Klett-Cotta; available at the ZKM | Museum Shop, €18.95).
- Organization / Institution
- ZKM