Generation X

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is the first novel by the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, published by St. Martin's Press in 1991. The novel popularised the term Generation X.

The book is a framed narrative, in the manner of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales or Boccaccio's The Decameron, in which a group of young people exchange heartfelt stories about themselves and fantastical stories of their own creation. The framing story belongs to three friends, Dag, Claire and the narrator Andy, who live together in the Coachella Valley in southern California, and the novel is arranged in three parts, with the tales told by the various characters. Each chapter has a title of its own rather than a number, among them I Am Not a Target Market and Adventure Without Risk Is Disneyland. The book is set around 1990, in the rapidly growing and economically uneven southern California of that moment, and its characters are the twenty-somethings of the title, working at low-paying jobs with no future in them.

Coupland's novel gave a name to a cohort that had not had one, and he returned to the same territory with a similarly titled book, Generation A, in 2009.