New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
Now available in a new edition with a cover designed by the author, Douglas Coupland’s CBC Massey Lectures is an innovative exploration of the modern crises of our time.
Five disparate people are trapped inside an airport cocktail lounge during a global disaster: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, a down-on-his-luck bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcockian blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, over the course of the five-hour story, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end.
Acclaimed novelist and visual artist Douglas Coupland probes human identity, society, religion, macroeconomics, and the afterlife in the inventive 2010 CBC Massey Lectures. Asking as many questions as it answers, Player One will leave readers with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species — and that there is no turning back.
Editorial Reviews
[Player One] feels essential because this is a novel obsessed not only with time, and the curse of experiencing the world through linear time, but with stories and the breakdown of storytelling as a way of making meaning in our lives.
— Globe and Mail
Packed full of ideas and always a joy to follow.
— Big Issue Scotland
Douglas Coupland takes readers on a captivating ride.
— Winnipeg Free Press
As Player One haunts the pages of this book, the ideas and inferences you read will haunt your mind every time you indulge in a modern day convenience, such as filling a vehicle up with gas, making this book a worthy read.
— Silo
A taut and scintillating exploration of time, Coupland’s tale is both smart and suspenseful while simultaneously questioning the meaning of narration.
— Booklist
[Douglas Coupland has] an ease with the language of modernity that contemporary Great North American Novelists should envy... his Eeyorish pessimism, left-field humour and admirable ability to enunciate all of our half-formed thoughts raise this from a sterile dissertation on why modern life is rubbish into the realms of really great fiction.
— Independent
As always with Coupland, the ideas come thick and fast, they’re quirky, often funny, and frequently profound.
— Daily Mail
The way Coupland moulds his fiction from the throwaway debris of North American popular culture is quite brilliant.
— Guardian
This is a superior read for those who want the latest thoughts from a nimble, complex author who thinks about this kind of stuff all the time.
— Tampa Tribune
Eminently readable, humorous, and philosophical.
— Library Journal
An apt critique of modern consciousness.
— Publishers Weekly
