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  • Published: 16 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780099510895
  • Imprint: Windmill Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

Bit Rot




A stunning collection from Douglas Coupland that explores the different ways 20th-century notions of the future are being shredded.

In Bit Rot, Douglas Coupland explores the different ways in which twentieth-century notions of the future are being shredded, and creates a gem of the digital age. Reading the stories and essays in Bit Rot is like bingeing on Netflix . . . you can't stop with just one.

‘Bit rot’ is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As 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 explores the ways 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 legion of fans hungry for his observations about our world. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, and his phrase-making. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise and delight.

  • Published: 16 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9780099510895
  • Imprint: Windmill Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 432
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Douglas Coupland

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, 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, Everything is Anything is Anywhere is Everywhere at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, 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.

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Praise for Bit Rot

[Coupland’s] new collection has its basis in that rarefied literary form, the art catalogue … [he] is at his best when he muses on new opportunities and challenges presented by technology.

The National

[T]he Vancouver-based tech-seer, critic, author and artist again proves himself to be one of the most entertaining and thoughtful futurologists on the planet.

The Herald

Bit Rot is wry and wise, terrifying and hilarious, and it makes us LOL while still using "LOL" correctly.

i Paper

Every page is full of wit, surprise and delight

Dluxe Magazine

Coupland adopts…an Andy Warholish mode, somewhere between mocking, lamenting, celebrating even the most troubling aspects of postmodernity.

Times Literary Supplement