Polaroids from the Dead

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 polaroids 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 (source of "The Dead" in title), a post-mortem letter to Kurt Cobain, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, and an... more

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 polaroids 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 (source of "The Dead" in title), a post-mortem letter to Kurt Cobain, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, and an homage to James Rosenquist's 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 book is split into three parts. The first part is Polaroids from the Dead, which is a collection of short stories inspired by a series of Grateful Dead concerts. The second is Portraits of People and Places, which is a collection of essays about people and places, including a... less