(Fiction; St. Martin’s Griffin, 1991)
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is a road map for the children of the mid-1960s through the ’70s, a generation born in the shadow of their baby boomer parents. Like Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Douglas Coupland’s premiere novel not only defined but also imprinted a style and attitude for many readers whose cultural waypoint had been the desire to distance themselves from their parents. And for younger, post–Generation X readers, Coupland’s novel has become a cult classic for its time, not unlike how Kerouac’s On the Road and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther were for their times.