Douglas Coupland’s Generation X is one of those books that accidentally gave a decade a vocabulary that became both useful and mildly cursed.

Published in 1991, it follows three overeducated, underemployed twenty-somethings drifting through Palm Springs, telling each other stories while trying to escape the machinery of work, aspiration, consumption and inherited adult life. oOfice dread, McJobs, emotional irony, ecological unease, brand-saturated loneliness, all arriving before the internet made the condition terminal.

Coupland’s style is fragmentary, funny, diagrammatic and weirdly prophetic — a novel full of definitions, slogans, little cultural autopsies, and side-glancing despair. It reads now less like a Gen X artefact than a prehistory of contemporary burnout: the point where anti-career cool, pop culture literacy and ambient end-times anxiety start fusing into one clean little radioactive lifestyle object.

Abacus paperback reprint. Good condition with light shelf wear and some page tanning.