Checking Availibility...Description
Psychosis: any form of severe mental disorder in which the individual's contact with reality becomes highly distorted.
65-year-old Janet Drummond checks the clock in her cheap motel room near Cape Canaveral, takes her prescription pills and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her three children: Wade, the eldest, in and out of jail and still radiating "the glint"; suicidal Bryan, whose girlfriend, the vowel-free Shw, is pregnant; and Sarah, the family's shining light, an astronaut preparing to be launched into space as the star of a shuttle mission. They will all arrive in Orlando--along with Janet's ex-husband Ted and his new trophy wife--setting the stage for the most disastrous family reunion in the history of fiction. Florida may never recover from their version of fun in the sun.
Adultery, hostage-taking, a letter purloined from Princess Diana's coffin, heart attacks at Disney World, bankruptcy, addiction and black-market negotiations--Coupland piles on one deft, comic plot twist after another, leaving you reaching for your seat belt. When the crash comes, it is surprisingly sweet.
From lauded writer, visual artist and designer Douglas Coupland, All Families are Psychotic is sizzling and sharp-witted entertainment that resounds with eternal human yearnings.
About this Author
DOUGLAS COUPLAND is a Canadian writer, visual artist, and designer. His first novel is the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, still celebrated for its biting humour and cultural relevancy thirty years since initial publication. He has published fourteen novels, two collections of short stories, and eight nonfiction books. He has written and performed for England's Royal Shakespeare Company, is a columnist for The Financial Times of London, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. In 2000 Coupland amplified his visual art production and has recently had two separate museum retrospectives, Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Kunstinstituut Melly and Munich's Villa Stücke. In 2015 and 2016 Coupland was artist in residence in the Paris Google Cultural Institute. In May 2018, his exhibition on ecology, Vortex, opened at the Vancouver Aquarium. Coupland is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence.
Reviews
"[All Families Are Psychotic] works because Coupland writes as sweetly and cleanly as a vapour trail." --ELLE Canada
"Douglas Coupland. . . . offers a better view of our glittering, behemoth spaceship Earth than most offerings by the usual literary crowd. . . . Coupland ought to be our guide to today's chilled, illed psychonauts of inner and outer space." --Quill and Quire
"There is wit à la early Pynchon or McGuane or Elmore Leonard, and the story does hum along--amazing twists and turns, snappy dialogue, meditations on the future, on postwar concerns: technology, feminism, consumerism, crime, junk culture, genetics." --The Globe and Mail
"Subtly subversive." --Georgia Straight
"As rich as an ovenful of fresh-baked brownies and twice as nutty. . . . Everyone with a strange family--that is, everyone with a family--will laugh knowingly at the feuding, conducted with a maestro's ear for dialogue and a deep understanding of humanity." --People Magazine
"Although the Drummonds appear to be self-destructing, author Coupland reveals himself to be, somewhat surprisingly, an optimist. For him, the new millennium is an era full of promise and potential miracles, despite the seemingly terminal state of the world." --Booklist
"Taking whacks at Florida is a bit like shooting a whale in a barrel, but Coupland does it with precision and originality. . . . Vivid and true." --Washington Post
"Chirpy, bright and strenuously zany." --The New York Times
"Coupland mines tabloid territory for sensationalism, which he then undermines with ironic self-awareness. The can-you-top-this atmosphere will keep Coupland's Gen-X readers . . . totally amused." --Publishers Weekly
"A postmodern take on Tolstoy's maxim that 'all unhappy families are alike in their unhappiness.' For a writer so immersed in the slippery textures of our time, Coupland reveals old-fashioned concern for the nature of our social interaction. He questions why we value what we do, and the price we pay to get it." --Sunday Express
"Coupland manages to balance the more weighty strands of the story with an absurdly satirical vision, without compromising either. At the same time, he mines the present with such intensity that it seems like science fiction. This strange, often miraculous fusion has you laughing, thinking and crying all at once." --Evening Standard
"Fantastic characters and a beyond-belief plot are insurance policies for white knuckles all the way, punctuated with belly laughs." --i-D Magazine
"This is high melodrama: divorce, dysfunction, inter-generational sex, marital infidelity, life-threatening illnesses (everyone has at least one) and spacemen. But Coupland does not tell it in the florid, intense style of the melodrama queen. The tone is. . . . sophisticated . . . dreamlike." --The New Statesman
If the product is in stock at the store nearest you, we suggest you call ahead to have it set aside for you, or you may place an order online and choose in-store pickup.
