A graphic-novel guide to the demented present from the authors of the
bestselling The Age of Earthquakes
If you're wondering why the inside of your head feels so strange these
days, this book has the answers. The Extreme Self is a new kind of
graphic novel that shows how you've been morphing into something else.
It's about the remaking of your interior world as the exterior world
becomes more unfamiliar and uncertain. Basar, Coupland and Obrist's cult
prequel, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, was
hailed as "a meditation on the madness of our media" (Dazed) and "an
abstract representation of how we feel about our digital world"
(Hello!). Like that book, The Extreme Self collapses comedy and
calamity at the speed of swipe. Dazzling images are sourced from over 70
of the world's foremost artists, photographers, technologists and
musicians, while Daly & Lyon's kinetic design elevates the language of
memes into a manifesto. Over 14 timely chapters, The Extreme Self
tours through fame and intimacy, post-work and new crowds, identity
crisis and eternity. Crazed, hilarious, unsettling, true. No other book
today so presciently predicts how the present and the future have become
the same thing. The Extreme Self is an accelerated tale for an even
more accelerated culture. Welcome to the Age of You.
Cultural critic Shumon Basar (born 1974) is the author of Do You
Often Confuse Love with Success and with Fame? (2012).
Canadian novelist and artist Douglas Coupland (born 1961) is the
author of Girlfriend in a Coma: A Novel (2008), Life After God
(1994) and Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991).
Swiss art curator, critic and art historian Hans Ulrich Obrist (born
1968) is the artistic director at the Serpentine Galleries in London and
the author of numerous books, including Hans Ulrich Obrist: Infinite
Conversations (2020), Ways of Curating (2014) and A Brief History of
Curating (2008).
