Generation X
Tales for an Accelerated Culture
ISBN10: 1250810779
ISBN13: 9781250810779
Trade Paperback
192 Pages
$16.99
CA$22.99
Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit pointless jobs in their respective hometowns to find better meaning in life. Adrift in the California desert, the trio develops an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs—"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create their own modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs as well as disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.
A dark snapshot of the trio's highly fortressed inner world quickly emerges—peeling back the layers on their fanatical individualism, pathological ambivalence about the future, and unsatisfied longing for permanence, love, and their own home.
Andy, Dag, and Claire are underemployed, overeducated, intensely private, and unpredictable. They have nowhere to assuage their fears, and no culture to replace their anomie.
Reviews
Praise for Generation X
"A groundbreaking novel."—Los Angeles Times
"Amusingly explores the more restless and disaffected segment of the under-30 crowd."—The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
"A readable and valid account of a generation that envisions a completely new and genuine genre of bohemianism."—San Francisco Chronicle
"Captures the listlessness that accompanies growing up in today's info-laden culture."—Rolling Stone