About this ebook
The first and only story of love and looming apocalypse set in the aisles of an office supply superstore.
In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—sort of a Clerks-meets-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of twenty-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And then there’s Roger’s co-worker Bethany, who’s at the end of her Goth phase, and young enough to be looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in Aisle Six.
One day, Bethany comes across Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her—and spookily, he is getting her right. She also learns he has a tragedy in his past—and suddenly he no longer seems like just a paper-stocking robot with a name tag.
These two retail workers strike up a peculiar and touching epistolary relationship, reminding us that love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief highlights number-one bestselling author Douglas Coupland’s eye for the comedy, loneliness and strange comforts of contemporary life.
In Douglas Coupland’s ingenious novel—sort of a Clerks-meets-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf—we meet Roger, a divorced, middle-aged “aisles associate” at a Staples outlet, condemned to restocking reams of twenty-lb. bond paper for the rest of his life. And then there’s Roger’s co-worker Bethany, who’s at the end of her Goth phase, and young enough to be looking at fifty more years of sorting the red pens from the blue in Aisle Six.
One day, Bethany comes across Roger’s notebook in the staff room. When she opens it up, she discovers that this old guy she’s never considered as quite human is writing mock diary entries pretending to be her—and spookily, he is getting her right. She also learns he has a tragedy in his past—and suddenly he no longer seems like just a paper-stocking robot with a name tag.
These two retail workers strike up a peculiar and touching epistolary relationship, reminding us that love, death and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them. Through a complex layering of narratives, The Gum Thief highlights number-one bestselling author Douglas Coupland’s eye for the comedy, loneliness and strange comforts of contemporary life.
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4.0
3 reviews
About the 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.
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