Chuck Palahniuk

<p>Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, she’s now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesn’t stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages they’ve found on the walls of houses he remodeled. </p> <p>Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from America’s most inventive nihilist, and Palahniuk’s most impressive work to date.</p> Diary "CAN YOU FEEL THIS?" Diary takes the form of a "coma diary" kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at school and being brought back to once quaint, now tourist-overrun Waytansea Island, she's been reduced to the condition of a resort hotel maid. Peter, it turns out, has been hiding rooms in houses he's remodeled and scrawling vile messages all over the walls-an old habit of builders but dramatically overdone in Peter's case. Angry homeowners are suing left and right, and Misty's dreams of artistic greatness are in ashes. But then, as if possessed by the spirit of Maura Kinkaid, a fabled Waytansea artist of the nineteenth century, Misty begins painting again, compulsively. But can her newly discovered talent be part of a larger, darker plan? Of course it can … Praise "Just for the record, Diary is as hypnotic as a poised cobra. Chuck Palahniuk demonstrates that the most chilling special effects come not from Industrial Light and Magic but from the words of a gifted writer." – Ira Levin, author of Rosemary's Baby

SUMMARY: With more than 300,000 copies sold, Chuck Palahniuk's brilliant first novel and cult classic is being reissued with a new Introduction by the author An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, "Fight Club" is widely recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels of the last decade. Now the author adds his own voice to the critical debate he generated. In a new Introduction, he discusses the various interpretations in the popular media of "Fight Club" and the movie it inspired, as well as his personal reactions to the work's reception and the influence that the "Fight Club "phenomenon has already had on our culture. Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a disenfranchised young man frustrated with his bureacratic job and superficial relationships and disillusioned with the consumer culture's prepackaged pleasures. Relief for him and his peers comes in the form of Tyler Durden, the intensely charismatic inventor of Fight Club. Waiters, clerks, and middlemen seek out the visceral satisfaction of secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars, thinking they have found a way to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.Chuck Palahniuk is the bestselling author of "Diary," "Lullaby," and "Choke." He lives and works in Portland, Oregon. In this darkly funny first novel that made Chuck Palahniuk's reputation as his generation's most visionary satirist, an estranged young man seeks relief from the emptiness of his work and life in the enigmatic figure of Tyler Durden. Flaunting his disregard for the stultifying conventions of a hollow consumer culture, Tyler devises a series of secret after-hours boxing matches held in the basements of bars. Fight Club offers way for Tyler and his friends to overcome the frustrations of their professional and personal lives, and his idea catches on quickly. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes. An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, "Fight Club" is now recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels published in the last decade. In an insightful new introduction, the author discusses why the story will resonate with readers now more than ever. ""Fight Club" offers diabolically sharp and funny writing."--"The Washington Post Book World" "An astonishing debut . . . "Fight Club" is a dark, unsettling and nerve-chafing satire."--"The Seattle Times " "A powerful, dark, original novel . . . a memorable debut by an important new writer."--Robert Stone

SUMMARY: In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's 'fugitives and refugees.' Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots,' as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise actually believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to "a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly sincere, fascinating people who maybe should've kept their mouths shut."Here are strange personal museums, wierd annual events and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers' sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe's famous 1940's Self-cleaning house. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland Zoo.Oh, the list goes on and on. SUMMARY: In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's 'fugitives and refugees.' Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots,' as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise actually believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to "a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly sincere, fascinating people who maybe should've kept their mouths shut."Here are strange personal museums, wierd annual events and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers' sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe's famous 1940's Self-cleaning house. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland Zoo.Oh, the list goes on and on.

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? Curious about Chuck's debut in an MTV music video? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the Apocalypse Caf-? In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America's "fugitives and refugees." Get to know these folks, the "most cracked of the crackpots," as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to "a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should've kept their mouths shut."Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers' sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe's famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo. Oh, the list goes on and on.

"Haunted" by Chuck Palahniuk is a novel made up of stories: Twenty-three of them, to be precise. Twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter--sometimes all at once. They are told by people who have answered an ad headlined "Writers' Retreat: Abandon Your Life for Three Months," and who are led to believe that here they will leave behind all the distractions of "real life" that are keeping them from creating the masterpiece that is in them. But "here" turns out to be a cavernous and ornate old theater where they are utterly isolated from the outside world--and where heat and power and, most important, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more extreme the stories they tell--and the more devious their machinations become to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/nonfiction blockbuster that will surely be made from their plight. "Haunted" is on one level a satire of reality television--"The Real World" meets "Alive. " It draws from a great literary tradition--"The Canterbury Tales," "The Decameron," the English storytellers in the Villa Diodati who produced, among other works, "Frankenstein"--to tell an utterly contemporary tale of people desperate that their story be told at any cost. Appallingly entertaining, "Haunted" is Chuck Palahniuk at his finest--which means his most extreme and his most provocative.

EDITORIAL REVIEW: She's a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you'll ever want to look.

For the first time in hardcover, an expanded, radically refashioned "director's cut" of a favorite Chuck Palahniuk novel. Injected with new materialand special design elements, *Invisible Monsters Remix* fulfills Chuck Palahniuk’s original vision for his1999 novel, turning a daring satire on beauty and the fashion industry into aneven more wildly unique reading experience. Palahniuk’s fashion-model protagonisthas it all—boyfriend, career, loyal best friend—until an accident destroys herface, her ability to speak, and her self-esteem. Enter Brandy Alexander, QueenSupreme, one operation away from becoming a bona-fide woman. Laced in are newchapters of memoir and further scenes with the book’s characters. Readers willjump between chapters, reread the book to understand the dissolve betweenfiction and fact, and decipher the playful book design, embarking on a ridethey’ll never forget. All type irregularities in the text are intended. ### Review ''Palahniuk's stories don't unfold. They hurtle headlong, changing lanes in threes and banging off the guard rails of modern fiction.'' --James Sullivan, *San Francisco Chronicle* ### Review Palahniuk 's stories don t unfold. They hurtle headlong, changing lanes in threes and banging off the guard rails of modern fiction. --James Sullivan

<h3>Amazon.com Review</h3><p>The consequences of media saturation are the basis for an urban nightmare in <em>Lullaby</em>, Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic and often dazzling thriller. Assigned to write a series of feature articles investigating SIDS, troubled newspaper reporter Carl Streator begins to notice a pattern among the cases he encounters: each child was read the same poem prior to his or her death. His research and a tip from a necrophilic paramedic lead him to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who sells "distressed" (demonized) homes, assured of their instant turnover. Boyle and Streator have both lost children to "crib death," and she confirms Streator's suspicions: the poem is an ancient lullaby or "culling song" that is lethal if spoken--or even thought--in a victim's direction. The misanthropic Streator, now armed with a deadly and uncontrollably catchy tune, goes on a minor killing spree until he recognizes his crimes and the song's devastating potential. <em>Lullaby</em> then turns into something of a road trip narrative, with Streator, Boyle, her empty-headed Wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's vigilante boyfriend Oyster setting out across the U.S. to track down and destroy all copies of the poem.</p><p>In his previous works, including the cult favorite __, Palahniuk has demonstrated a fondness for making statements about the condition of humanity, and he uses <em>Lullaby</em> like a blunt object to repeatedly overstate his generally dim view. Such dogmatic venom undermines the persuasiveness of his thesis about mass communication and free will, but thankfully, Palahniuk offers some respite here by allowing for sympathy and love, as well as through his razor-sharp humor, such as his mock listings for Helen's possessed properties: "six bedrooms, four baths, pine-paneled entryway, and blood running down the kitchen walls...." At such moments, <em>Lullaby</em> casts a powerful spell. <em>--Ross Doll</em></p><h3>From Publishers Weekly</h3><p>"I need to rebel against myself. It's the opposite of following your bliss. I need to do what I most fear." Beleaguered reporter Carl Streator is stuck writing about SIDS and grieving for his dead wife and child; he copes by building perfect model homes and smashing them with a bare foot. But things only get worse: Carl accidentally memorizes an ancient African "culling song" that kills anyone he focuses on while mentally reciting it, until killing "gets to be a bad habit." His only friend, Nash, a creepy necrophiliac coroner, amuses himself with Carl's victims. Salvation of a sort comes in the form of Helen Hoover Boyle, a witch making a tidy living as a real estate broker selling-and quickly reselling-haunted houses. She, too, knows the culling song and finances her diamond addiction by freelancing as a telepathic assassin. Carl and Helen hit the road with Helen's Wiccan assistant, Mona, and her blackmailing boyfriend, Oyster, on a search-and-destroy mission for all outstanding copies of the culling song, as well as an all-powerful master tome of spells, a grimoire. Hilarious satire, both supernatural and scatological, ensues, the subtext of which seems to be Palahniuk's conviction that information has become a weapon ("Imagine a plague you catch through your ears"), and the bizarre love affair between Helen and Carl offers the lone linear thread in a field of narrative flak bursts. But the chief significance of this novel is Palahniuk's decision to commit himself to a genre, and this horror tale of both magic and mundane modernity plants him firmly in a category where previously he existed as a genre of one. <br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>

EDITORIAL REVIEW: ***The Manchurian Candidate* meets *South Park*—Chuck Palahniuk’s finest novel since the generation-defining *Fight Club*.***“Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.”*Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates us with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of an American xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified. For Pygmy and his fellow operatives are cooking up something big, something truly awful, that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees.It’s a comedy. And a romance.

EDITORIAL REVIEW: The *Rant Limited Edition*** **is specially packaged in a one-piece preprinted case, printed black, with the title created in spot gloss; a 4-color slipcase that matches the original jacket of the trade book; a 1/8" ribbon marker; a signed tip-in sheet, speckled edges; and an exclusive 1300-word "Automotive Afterword" entitled "Recipes for Disasters" which is not available in print anywhere but only in this limited edition. **“Like most people I didn’t meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of friends just explodes…”***Rant* is the mind-bending new novel from Chuck Palahniuk, the literary provocateur responsible for such books as the generation-defining classic Fight Club and the pedal-to-the-metal horrorfest Haunted. It takes the form of an oral history of one Buster “Rant” Casey, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. **“What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian Lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.” **A high-school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his small hometown of Middleton for the big city. He becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On appointed nights participants recognize each other by such designated car markings as “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti and then stalk and crash into each other. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death after which his friends gather testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. Their collected anecdotes explore the possibility that his saliva caused a silent urban plague of rabies and that he found a way to escape the prison house of linear time…**“The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.”–Rant Casey**Expect hilarity, horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He's the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the visionary to watch to learn what's–uh-oh–coming next.

Tender Branson – last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult" – is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback. Before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid– and collagen-packed media messiah, author of a best-selling autobiography, Saved from Salvation, and the even better selling Book of Very Common Prayer (The Prayer to Delay Orgasm, The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms). He'll even share his insight that "the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," and deny responsibility for the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Landfill – a 20,000-acre repository for the nation's outdated pornography. Among other matters both bizarre and trenchant. –courtesy of WW Norton Thoughts From Chuck "The books are never about what you think they are about. Survivor is really about our education system because I feel, more often than not, kids are sort of taught or trained to be the best possible cogs in some big corporate machine. They're not really taught in an empowered way that they can start their own company so that they can create and run their own lives. They are sort of taught to be just good employees, to just fit in." EDITORIAL REVIEW: From the author of the underground sensation Fight Club, a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious vision of cult and post-cult life. Tender Branson-last surviving member of the so-called "Creedish Death Cult"-is dictating his incredible life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the plane, which will shortly reach terminal velocity and crash into the vast Australian outback. Before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah, author of a best-selling autobiography, Saved from Salvation, and the even better selling Book of Very Common Prayer (The Prayer to Delay Orgasm, The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms). He'll even share his insight that "the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," and deny responsibility for the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Landfill-a 20,000-acre repository for the nation's outdated pornography. Among other matters both bizarre and trenchant. Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Jerzy Kosinski's Being There has there been as black and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak, and it marks him as a blazing talent for the new millennium. SUMMARY: From the author of the cult sensation Fight Club (now a major motion picture starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, and Helena Bonham Carter) comes Survivor."A turbo-charged, deliciously manic satire of contemporary American life." --Newsday"The only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," according to the "been there, done that" wisdom of Tender Branson, last surviving member of the Creedish Death Cult. At the opening of Chuck Palahniuk's hilariously unnerving second novel, Tender is cruising on autopilot, 39,000 feet up, dictating the whole of his life story into Flight 2039's "black box" in the final moments before crashing into the vast Australian outback.Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Wickedly incisive and mesmerizing, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak.