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Author | Douglas Coupland |
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Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 2000 |
Media type | Print (Hardback, Paperback) |
Preceded by | Girlfriend in a Coma |
Followed by | All Families Are Psychotic |
Miss Wyoming is a novel by Douglas Coupland. It was first published by Random House of Canada in January 2000.
The novel follows two protagonists, Susan Colgate, a former Miss Wyoming, and John Johnson, a former action film producer. Both have experienced early success but now find themselves in terminal career decline and with a host of personal problems. When circumstances intervene to offer routes out of their lives and then to bring them together, they are afforded the opportunity to discover themselves and to brighten their futures.
The title concretely derives from a plot point in the book in which a driven stage mother moves the family to Wyoming because it is the easiest state from which to land contestants in national competitions, though it has been noted that the title also comments on the peculiar notion of longing for something a person hasn't experienced herself. [1]
The novel is the story of John Johnson and Susan Colgate. It begins with a meeting between Susan and John after their yearlong absences from the world, and then progresses to tell the stories of their disappearances through flashbacks. The flashbacks have no temporal order. Each chapter is a different flashback, intermixed with chapters of temporally present plot.
The novel tells their stories, the stories of the characters that they encounter, and the story of their lives after they meet. The novel is written in the third person.
The whole thing with beauty pageants is really mother-driven. What three-year-old wants to be a beauty queen? … There's all this unhappiness and they think by making their kids a receptacle of all that unhappiness they can turn it into gold. The male version of this is Hollywood, full of hungry, unfulfilled people. I thought it would be interesting to take male and female versions of these people and put them together when they both wanted to change.
— Coupland on the roles of the characters
The inspiration for Miss Wyoming was a 1998 article in The National Enquirer [2] entitled "Leathery movie producer Robert Evans marries Eighties soap star Catherine Oxenberg". [3]
Coupland also based his opinions on celebrity life on his experiences with the rich and famous. "I guess a lot of it's residue from the fact that I've met all these famous people over the years. Some of them became friends. Some of them I met in passing, but I ended up with this huge reservoir of things [about fame] that wanted to be tapped." [4]
Between 1989 and 1997 or so, I did not go anywhere without a notebook that could fit in my pocket. . . . Then around '97, whatever I was doing became internal. So that with 'Miss Wyoming' there's not a single note for it. . . . Now it all just comes out of my head, and because it comes out of my head I think it's a bit more emotionally driven than artifactually or environmentally driven.
— Coupland on the change in creation for Miss Wyoming. [5]
Miss Wyoming marked a radical departure from Coupland's writing style for earlier novels. Previously, he wrote his notes from a notebook filled with observations. For Miss Wyoming, Coupland internalized the note-taking process. It was also his first novel written entirely in the third person. [5]
Jensen, Mikkel "Miss(ed) Generation: Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming. in Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, Volume 3, 2011, pp. 455–474. Direct link: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v3/a29/cu11v3a29.pdf
Microserfs, published by HarperCollins in 1995, is an epistolary novel by Douglas Coupland. It first appeared in short story form as the cover article for the January 1994 issue of Wired magazine and was subsequently expanded to full novel length. Set in the early 1990s, it captures the state of the technology industry before Windows 95, and anticipates the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.
Girlfriend in a Coma is a novel by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland. It was first published by HarperCollins Canada in 1998. The novel tells the story of a group of friends growing up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in the late 1970s. On the night of a teenage house-wrecking party, one of the protagonists, Karen, falls into a coma. More alarmingly, she seemed to expect it, having given her boyfriend, Richard, a letter detailing the vivid dreams of the future she had experienced and how she wanted to sleep for a thousand years to avoid that dystopia.
Life After God is a collection of short stories by Douglas Coupland, published in 1994. The stories are set around a theme of a generation raised without religion. The jacket for the hardcover book reads "You are the first generation to be raised without religion." The text is an exploration of faith in this vacuum of religion. The stories are also illustrated by the author. Several critics have suggested that this publication marks an early shift in the stylistic vocabulary of Coupland and, according to one critic, he was "excoriated presumably for attempting be serious and to express depression and spiritual yearning when his reviewers were expecting more postmodern jollity". However, the short story would later come to garner more praise though critics and academics have paid little attention to the publication in terms of academics' articles and commentary.
Mel, also sometimes referred to as Melanie, is a fictional character in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. A computer programmer from the 20th century who is a companion of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, she was a regular in the programme from 1986 to 1987. Her family name was never revealed on-screen, but production notes and promotional literature refer to her as Melanie Bush. She was portrayed by Bonnie Langford. Mel appeared in six stories and is the penultimate companion of the classic series.
Michael Dawson is a fictional character played by Harold Perrineau on the ABC television series Lost. Michael is one of the survivors of Oceanic Flight 815 who crashes on the show's mysterious island. After losing a custody battle with Susan Lloyd, Michael does not see his son Walt for almost ten years. They reunite when she dies, but on their journey home, their plane crashes on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. Here Walt is kidnapped by the Island's previous inhabitants, the Others, and Michael spends his time trying to retrieve him. He is eventually successful, and they leave the Island together, but the guilt over the murders he had to commit to achieve this leads him to an estrangement with his son and a suicide attempt. He returns to the Island on a freighter, but is killed when a bomb on it explodes. Michael reappears as a ghost, and apologizes to Hurley for killing Libby.
Yolande Margaret Betbeze Fox was an American singer and beauty pageant titleholder who was crowned Miss America 1951.
All Families Are Psychotic is the seventh novel by Douglas Coupland, published in 2001. The novel is the fictional story of the dysfunctional Drummond family and their adventures on a trip to see their daughter's space shuttle launch.
JPod is a novel by Douglas Coupland published by Random House of Canada in 2006. Set in 2005, the book explores the strange and unconventional everyday life of the main character, Ethan Jarlewski, and his team of video game programmers whose last names all begin with the letter 'J'.
The following lists some references to the Holocaust-era Jewish diarist Anne Frank in popular culture.
Polaroids from the Dead is a collection of short stories and essays by Douglas Coupland. The theme is that each story is written from a collection of old Polaroid photographs that Coupland found in a drawer. It is an attempt to describe the 1990s, a decade that "seemed to be living in a 1980s hangover". Topics of the stories include a Grateful Dead concert, a post-mortem letter to Kurt Cobain, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, and an homage to James Rosenquist's painting F-111. The book's ends with a longer essay on Brentwood, California, home to Marilyn Monroe's grave, and the O. J. Simpson murder case. The essay is in part a collage of menus, scraps of conversation, and postings from bulletin boards.
The Gum Thief is Canadian author Douglas Coupland's twelfth novel. It was published on September 25, 2007, by Random House Canada in Canada and Bloomsbury Publishing in the United States.
Miss Teen USA 1987, the 5th Miss Teen USA pageant, was televised live from El Paso Civic Center, El Paso, Texas on July 21, 1987. At the conclusion of the final competition, Kristi Lynn Addis of Mississippi was crowned by outgoing queen Allison Brown of Oklahoma.
"Meet Kevin Johnson" is the 80th television episode of the American Broadcasting Company's (ABC's) Lost and the eighth episode of the fourth season. It was written in October and November 2007 by supervising producer Elizabeth Sarnoff and co-producer Brian K. Vaughan, and directed in November by co-executive producer Stephen Williams. "Meet Kevin Johnson" first aired March 20, 2008, on ABC in the United States and on CTV in Canada.
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, Dis, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and 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 the Villa Stuck.
Generation A is the thirteenth novel from Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. It takes place in a near future, in a world in which bees have become extinct. The novel is told with a shifting-frame narrative perspective, shifting between the novel's five main protagonists. The novel mirrors the style of Coupland's first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, which is also a framed narrative. On September 30, 2009, Generation A was announced as a finalist for The Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize by The Writer's Trust of Canada.
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is the first novel by Douglas Coupland, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991. The novel, which popularized the term Generation X, is a framed narrative in which a group of youths exchange heartfelt stories about themselves and fantastical stories of their creation.
Player One: What Is to Become of Us is a novel written by Douglas Coupland for the 2010 Massey Lectures. Each of the book's five chapters was delivered as a one-hour lecture in a different Canadian city: Vancouver on October 12, Regina on October 14, Charlottetown on October 19, Ottawa on October 25 and ending in Toronto on October 29. The lectures were broadcast on CBC Radio One's Ideas, November 8–12. The book was published by House of Anansi Press.
Worst. Person. Ever. is the fourteenth novel by Douglas Coupland, published in 2013. The novel is the story of Raymond Gunt, an offensive and shocking narrator, and his journey from London through Los Angeles to Kiribati, an island in the Pacific Ocean, where he is to work on a reality television show. The novel focuses on this character's direct and inflammatory reflections on the world around him, and the characters he meets. In an interview with NPR, Coupland stated that the novel was written as an antidote to an "epidemic of earnestness", and that the book was motivated by the question, "Why not just go against a trend and write something that might actually damage a person's soul if they read it?"
Miss America 2016, the 89th Miss America pageant, was held at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey on Sunday, September 13, 2015. It was broadcast on ABC and streamed to mobile devices and Xbox 360 consoles via the WatchABC app. Tickets for the 2016 Miss America competition went on sale June 5, 2015.