Understanding Chuck Palahniuk
Understanding Chuck Palahniuk

Author: Douglas Keesey

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2016-09-30

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1611176980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An introduction to the fictions of the Fight Club author, who is both loved and loathed Ever since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a "shock jock" engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk's fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer's outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a "minimalist" writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer's novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante's Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed). Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.

Tell-All
Tell-All

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2011-02-15

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 140705242X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'Every word he's written about me is a lie including "and" and "the"...' For decades Hazie Coogan has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine 'Miss Kathie' Kenton, a star of the wattage of Elizabeth Taylor and the emotional torments of Judy Garland. The survivor of multiple marriages, career comebacks and cosmetic surgeries, Miss Kathie lives the way legends should. But danger lurks when gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III arrives and worms his way into Miss Kathie's heart and boudoir. Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written his celebrity tell-all memoir and that it foretells her death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman-penned World War II musical extravaganza Unconditional Surrender, in which Miss Kathie portrays Lily defeating Japanese forces from Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans - and for posterity...

Rant
Rant

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2008-05-06

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0307455599

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Buster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight, Rant is a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine.

Fight Club 3 (Graphic Novel)
Fight Club 3 (Graphic Novel)

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Dark Horse Comics

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1506711782

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Chuck Palahniuk writes the sequel to the sequel to Fight Club! Marla Singer is about to deliver her second child, but the daddy isn't her husband-it's Tyler Durden, who's very invested in his heir, and the world he'll inherit. Marla, her first son, and her husband-the unnamed narrator in the novel, who now goes by Balthazar-live in a rundown motel with sketchy neighbors. In the Fight Club 2 graphic novel, Tyler transformed Project Mayhem into Rize or Die-now, as a road to paradise presents itself, a new group has implemented a ruthless and deviant plan to fine-tune mankind, leading Balthazar to forge an unlikely alliance . . . with Tyler Durden"--

Fight Club: A Novel
Fight Club: A Novel

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2005-10-17

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0393066398

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club. Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation’s most visionary satirist in this, his first book. Fight Club’s estranged narrator leaves his lackluster job when he comes under the thrall of Tyler Durden, an enigmatic young man who holds secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars. There, two men fight "as long as they have to." This is a gloriously original work that exposes the darkness at the core of our modern world.

Damned
Damned

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Doubleday Canada

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 0385671113

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.

Consider This
Consider This

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 201

ISBN-13: 1538717964

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Renowned, bestselling novelist Chuck Palahniuk takes us behind the scenes of the writing life, with postcards from decades on the road and incredible examination of the power of fiction and the art of storytelling. In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing. With advice grounded in years of careful study and a keenly observed life, Palahniuk combines practical advice and concrete examples from beloved classics, his own books, and a "kitchen-table MFA" culled from an evolving circle of beloved authors and artists, with anecdotes, postcards from the road, and much more. Clear-eyed, sensitive, illuminating, and knowledgeable, Consider This is Palahniuk's love letter to stories and storytellers, booksellers and books themselves. Consider it a classic in the making.

Haunted
Haunted

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2005-05-03

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0385515839

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.

Doomed
Doomed

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 284

ISBN-13: 0385533152

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Madison Spencer, the liveliest and snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the afterlife adventure begun in Chuck Palahniuk’s bestseller Damned. Just as that novel brought us a brilliant Hell that only he could imagine, Doomed is a dark and twisted apocalyptic vision from this provocative storyteller. The bestselling Damned chronicled Madison’s journey across the unspeakable (and really gross) landscape of the afterlife to confront the Devil himself. But her story isn’t over yet. In a series of electronic dispatches from the Great Beyond, Doomed describes the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil. After a Halloween ritual gone awry, Madison finds herself trapped in Purgatory—or, as mortals like you and I know it, Earth. She can see and hear every detail of the world she left behind, yet she’s invisible to everyone who’s still alive. Not only do people look right through her, they walk right through her as well. The upside is that, no longer subject to physical limitations, she can pass through doors and walls. Her first stop is her parents’ luxurious apartment, where she encounters the ghost of her long-deceased grandmother. For Madison, the encounter triggers memories of the awful summer she spent upstate with Nana Minnie and her grandfather, Papadaddy. As she revisits the painful truth of what transpired over those months (including a disturbing and finally fatal meeting in a rest stop’s fetid men’s room, in which . . . well, never mind), her saga of eternal damnation takes on a new and sinister meaning. Satan has had Madison in his sights from the very beginning: through her and her narcissistic celebrity parents, he plans to engineer an era of eternal damnation. For everyone. Once again, our unconventional but plucky heroine must face her fears and gather her wits for the battle of a lifetime. Dante Alighieri, watch your back; Chuck Palahniuk is gaining on you.

Lullaby
Lullaby

Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2003-07-29

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1400075572

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times. "A harrowing and hilarious glimpse into the future of civilization.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.