With the dawn of a new millennium about to break, the Nineties was a strange, floating decade of positivity, hope and something called the World Wide Web. 

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Reading lists

Books that defined the 1990s

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

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9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

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Extracts

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Adjustment Day

The author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire

His best book in years… Mashing up the current febrile mood in America and the destructive impulses of Fight Club, Adjustment Day… skewers every tribe in the identity politics rainbow… Welcome back, Chuck.

An heir to Chuck Palahniuk's most famous novel, Fight Club, Adjustment Day is one of the most ingeniously fucked-up and enticingly original novels to be published this year... Think Will Self, George Orwell, Stephen King and William Burroughs mixed up in a Molotov cocktail.

There is more than a mere whiff of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Purge in Palahniuk’s latest novel, and it could be read as a treatise on contemporary America.

The Fight Club author is on a mission to offend everyone with his new satire about America… his humour expresses a genuine anger, and that gives his book a crackling energy… This is one of those books that is best enjoyed in a bad mood, when you’re thinking that a good cull is really what the human race needs, although even when feeling quite sunny, I found the glee Palahniuk takes in his Book of Revelation-esque scenario rather infectious.

Timely… with crosshairs fixed on the absurdity of both sides of the political divide. Set in contemporary America, the novel seizes hold of dark separatist ideas and drags them to their ultimate conclusion.

The author of Fight Club comes out swinging with a piece of political satire that aims at the heart of contemporary America.

Chuck Palahniuk is the bestselling author of fifteen fictional works, including Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You, and most recently Make Something Up. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

The author of Fight Club takes America beyond our darkest dreams in this timely satire. 
 
 People pass the word only to those they trust most: Adjustment Day is coming. They’ve been reading a mysterious blue-black book and memorising its directives. They are ready for the reckoning. 
 
In this ingeniously comic work, Chuck Palahniuk’s first novel in four years, he does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Smug, geriatric politicians hatch a nasty fate for the burgeoning population of young males; working-class men dream of burying the elites; and professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future. When it arrives, Adjustment Day inaugurates a new, disunited states. 
 
In this mind-blowing novel, Palahniuk fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche. 
 
‘His best book in years’ Irish Independent

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Fight Club

A BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Chuck Palahniuk's visceral and unflinching cult novel

First there was the insomnia. 
Then there were the support groups that helped him sleep. 
Then Marla Singer turned up, muscled in on ascending bowel cancer and ruined everything. 
Then he met Tyler Durden. 
Then came Fight Club. 
 
Fight Club is the psychological story of a man's descent into an underground world of violence. Mild mannered product-recall-specialist by day, tortured insomniac by night, our narrator meets Tyler Durden - part-time projectionist, banquet waiter, soap-maker and anarchic genius. Together they create Fight Club. In Fight Club our narrator, and men like him, can escape the monotony of their daily work-dominated, consumer-driven, image-obsessed lives. In Fight Club you can escape who the world thinks you ought to be. 
 
Soon there are Fight Clubs in basement bars in towns and cities across the country; men with cuts, bruises, stitches, missing teeth wherever you look, and Tyler Durden has become an urban legend. But when Tyler invents Project Mayhem and things begin to escalate, there's only one thing to do: shut down Fight Club. 
 
But have they created a monster they can't control? 
 
Chuck Palahniuk's visceral and unflinching cult novel stars Patrick Kennedy, Sam Hazeldine and Elaine Cassidy. 
 
Cast: 
The Narrator...Patrick Kennedy 
Tyler Durden...Sam Hazeldine 
Marla Singer... Elaine Cassidy 
Big Bob...Martin Sherman 
Doctor/Boss...Nigel Whitmey 
Recruit One...Danny Mahoney 
Mechanic...John Schwab 
Ted...Sam Dale 
Glenda...Jane Slavin 
Chloe...Ayesha Antoine 
 
Dramatised by Tracey Malone and Ed Whitmore 
Produced by Heather Larmour

Make Something Up

Stories you'll never forget - just try - from literature's most transgressive author

Twenty-one stories and a novella to disturb and delight.

Looking back at Palahniuk’s body of work it seems shocking readers comes naturally to him; if that is what you’re looking for, you won’t be disappointed here. He clearly relishes pushing boundaries, playing with the absurd and the grotesque as a way to hold up a mirror to society.

Palahniuk is in sublime, caustic form; his story subjects even more wickedly bold.

Savage, disturbing and frequently hilarious, this is writing at its boldest.

Chuck Palahniuk is the bestselling author of fifteen fictional works, including Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, Diary, Haunted, Rant, Pygmy, Tell-All, Damned, Doomed, Beautiful You, and most recently Make Something Up. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Twenty-one stories and a novella that will disturb and delight, from the author of Fight Club. The absurdity of both life and death are on full display. In 'Zombies', the best and brightest of a high school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In 'Knock, Knock', a son hopes to tell one last off-colour joke to his dying father , while in 'Tunnel of Love', a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients. And in 'Excursion', Fight Club fans will be thrilled to find a side of Tyler Durden never seen before. 
 
Funny, caustic, bizarre, poignant; these stories represent everything readers have come to love and expect from Chuck Palahniuk.

Beautiful You

A billion husbands are about to be replaced.

From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of female pleasure. Sisters will be doing it for themselves. And doing it. And doing it. And doing it some more... 
 
Penny Harrigan is a low level associate in a big Manhattan law firm with an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner by one C. Linus Maxwell, aka 'Climax-Well', a software mega-billionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth. After dining at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurant, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. What's not to like? 
 
This: Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys to be marketed in a nationwide chain of boutiques called 'Beautiful You'. So potent and effective are these devices that women line up in their millions outside the stores on opening day then lock themselves in their room and stop coming out. Except for batteries. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped. But how?

Doomed

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 Palahniuk could imagine, Doomed is a dark and twisted apocalyptic vision from this provocative storyteller.

It's not for the faint-stomached. It's also rather brilliant… A grand, funny, troubling and rewarding read… Maddie is my new post-alive heroine.

Funny, bloody and always original. But then we should expect nothing less from the creator of Fight Club.

Instantly engaging (and excellently gory)… it makes Tyler Durden's psychological problems look positively pedestrian.

A fantastic exploration of modern fame, unfolding in typically opaque sci-fi style as we follow child-of-the-stars Madison after she overdoses on Oscar night and is driven to hell in a limo.

Hellishly good reading... Filled with Palahniuk's sublimely detailed grossness and blacker-than-black giggles.

[Doomed] has plenty of darkness, body fluids and body parts. It's also very funny... but what's often passed over in Palahniuk's work is the genuine emotion: sadness, tenderness, pain, vulnerability.

[Chuck Palahniuk is] an uncompromising storyteller…a sort of knowing nihilism that can be pungent, funny and transgressive…. He has a pop star’s knack for existentialism and kitsch.

Convoluted, imperfect, this is nonetheless a grand, funny, troubling and rewarding read, and personally, I can't wait for the third of the trilogy.

An inventive pillorying of modern America

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, her saga of eternal damnation takes on a new and sinister meaning. Madison has been in Satan’s sights from the very beginning, as 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.

Damned

A dark, disturbing and very, very funny new novel from the inimitable Chuck Palahniuk - his best yet.

The Lovely Bones meets The Shawshank Redemption via Judy Blume. Expect to be appalled

True to Palahniuk form, Damned is gross in parts, scandalous in others and funny throughout

Gleefully riffing on Judy Blume's 1970 coming-of-age classic Are You There God? It's Me Margaret, Palahniuk's dead heroine must traverse the infernal landscape in search of Satan - and of her true self - as she tries to discover exactly how she died

The vistas of his underworld are engrossing

The hip, flip prose skips along invoking and ridiculing pop culture

Damned is highly imaginative and downright funny, representing Chuck Palahniuk at his satirical, twisted best

A dark but funny novel about a 13-year-old girl's journey through hell

Funny and sad, Damned still sneaks in the moments of graphic obnoxiousness that have made Palahniuk into a notorious cult figure

Palahniuk certainly has a way with words. His ever-inventive, high-energy prose is a joy

Damned is vintage Chuck - as dark as it gets, but with loads of gross-out humour, all your favourite dead celebs, and plenty of grim details of the Inferno's unmentionable horrors

An almost divine comedy that conjures up an underworld whose sinners are more likely to be guilty of sartorial, not satanic, misdemeanors

'Are you there, Satan? It's me, Madison' 
 
Meet Madison, whip-tongued daughter of a narcissistic film star and a billionaire, abandoned at a Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off adopting more orphans. Madison dies of a marijuana overdose and awakes to find herself in Hell, sharing her cell with a motley crew of young sinners that's almost too good to be true. 
 
Welcome to the afterlife as only Palahniuk could imagine it - he makes eternal torment, well, simply divine.

Invisible Monsters Remix

An expanded, radically refashioned 'director's cut' of this favorite Chuck Palahniuk novel.

Maybe our generation has found its Don Delillo

A clever, comical pell-mell through gender politics and stereotyped expectations, to explore the extremes of will-power, and of living as one wishes

Readers can either disregard the author and read it in the conventional way or follow his instructions and jump to the chapter you are told. The thrill of defiance in the former almost matches the same show-like excitement of the latter – both are exhilarating and rewarding options

Twelve years on, Palahniuk revisits this work – mashing up its linear narrative to recreate the pre-Internet thrill of flicking through Vogue or the Sears catalogue

With its nonlinear format and instructions to jump from one chapter to another, this book might appear to be style over substance, but that’s the point: if you don’t want to look beyond the style, whether its ugly or beautiful, you’ll never find out what’s beneath

She's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her an 'invisible monster', so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, who will teach her that reinventing yourself sometimes means erasing your past and making up something better... 
 
Injected with new material and special design elements, Invisible Monsters Remix is a radically refashioned 'director's cut' of a favourite Chuck Palahniuk novel, turning a daring satire on beauty and the fashion industry into an even more wildly unique reading experience.

Tell-All

Chuck Palahniuk tackles Hollywood, in an hilarious assault on celebrity, and the Golden Age of Hollywood, when grand dames ruled the roost.

Blackly hilarious...full of brilliantly acid one-liners...a gripping, outrageous and stylishly written hoot

Chuck turns his gimlet and razor sharp pen on celebrity, with a darkly sparkling tale inspired by the classic All About Eve

Palahniuk remains a cutting stylist who knows how to toss a well-aimed barb

With his love of contemporary fairy tales that are gritty and dirty rather than pretty, Palahniuk is the likeliest inheritor of Vonnegut's place in American writing

Chuck Palahniuk is one of modern American fiction's most interesting stylists, and he's at it again... A masterful feat

'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...

Pygmy

The most ambitious novel yet from the author of Fight Club and Choke.

A hilarious novel...as ever, Palahniuk is interested in pushing the limits. He leaps over the line of good taste - and lands squarely on his feet

Brilliantly conceived, linguistically inventive and extremely rude

The novel abandons minimalism for a Clockwork Orange-style spin through a semi-invented language. Consequently, it's Palahniuk's most challenging book yet

Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland. An 'exchange student' he is welcomed with open arms by his Midwestern host family. Simpsons-spinoffs, they introduce him into the rituals of postmodern American life, which he views with utter contempt. Along with his fellow operatives, he is planning something big, something truly, truly awful, to bring this big dumb country's fat inhabitants to their knees.

Snuff

From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a novel about a porn queen's attempt to break the world's record for consecutive acts of sexual intercourse on film. Or die trying...

It's glorious, gloriously depraved. Gloriously funny, gloriously heartbreaking and gloriously outrageous, just what you might expect from a writer continually pushing at the boundaries of literature...confirms Palahniuk once again as a compelling, daring and vital writer

Every bit as dangerous as it sounds... Snuff is a deliciously disturbing, superbly paced and graphically obnoxious read

Snuff is a Chernobyl of taboos...Palahniuk investigates his novels for months before he begins to write, so they always have a journalistic reek of authenticity and immediacy: he is like Tom Wolfe on acid... Think of it as The Bonfire of the Inanities. Once you have come down and mopped up the vomit, you will be glad you snorted this particular Snuff

Palahniuk is a deeply talented and original satirist...a class act of characterisation and situation comedy, wrapped up in something much more important

Cassie Wright, porn princess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr 72, Mr 137 and Mr 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room...

The Oral History of Buster Casey

Rant

'The twisted genius behind Fight Club delivers another literary gem... It's a deranged, hiliarious and unique novel' Maxim

Rant is fast and true...and so funny that your facial muscles soon tire

This is a wonderful book and the author is never short of wonderful ideas - they fizz from every page. Palahniuk's world might be a freak-show, but it's one that makes a disturbing amount of sense

Palahniuk's fiction shows a rare bravery and occasionally hits true brilliance. Rant may not only be his best book yet, but the best by any novelist in some time

The twisted genius behind Fight Club delivers another literary gem... It's a deranged, hiliarious and unique novel

It's a sort of Fight Club on wheels... When Palahniuk puts his foot on the throttle and pulls all the various voices towards a spectacular conclusion, in every sense, Rant quickly becomes a definite scream

There is no question that Palahnuik is an important writer with a huge popular following... I'm glad he continues to bring us these American visions of Hell, each one more disturbing than the last

[Chuck Palahniuk]'s a writer of remarkable talent, willing to look unflinchingly at despairing lives and their often-warped quests for even momentary redemption. He's a painfully deft chronicler of the meaningless job, the poisonous relationship, and of all the myriad damaging and deadening effects of so-called normal life

Chuck Palahniuk puts out books the way The Beatles and The Stones used to release records - nearly every year, with precision and artistry

Just as Fight Club pondered the price of everyone becoming supermen, Rant goes one step further and wonders the price of us all becoming gods. It is a common thread in Palahniuk's writing: the yearning for a ground zero of social parity versus our genetically programmed rebellion against hegemony

A twisted paranoid version of our world... so even if the suspicion sometimes lingers that Palahniuk is like a hip uncle tring to impress the kids with his capacities fo taboo-breaking and imaginative riffs, he still presents something that we all yearn for

Ever since Fight Club...Chuck Palahniuk has enjoyed a reputation as a down-dirty, cultish kind of writer with his finger on the pulse

Rant is the oral history of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, detractors, lovers and relations have their say on the man who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Rant is a darkly glittering anti-hero whose recreational drug of choice is rabies, and whose own personal Viagra is the venom of a black widow spider. He soon leaves his half-feral hometown for the big city, where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On designated nights, the Party Crashers chase each other in cars in the hope of a collision, and all the while Rant, the 'superspreader', transmits his lethal disease...

Haunted

Definitely not for the faint hearted. This short story collection has been described as 'the most original work of fiction this year' Guardian

By turns nauseating, darkly funny and brutally graphic

A triumph... A novel of exceptional originality... Wonderful... A remarkable book, the most original work of fiction this year

Deeply satirical, brutal and provocative, Haunted is harshly compulsive, eye-bleeding stuff

One of the most popular novelists in the world...his fiction hits a nerve... Haunted breaks new ground

Haunted is a novel made up of stories: twenty-three of the most horrifying, hilarious, mind-blowing, stomach-churning tales you'll ever encounter. They are told by the people who have all answered an ad headlined 'Artists Retreat: Abandon your life for three months'. They 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 theatre where they are utterly isolated from the outside world - and where heat and power and, most importantly, food are in increasingly short supply. And the more desperate the circumstances become, the more desperate the stories they tell - and the more devious their machinations to make themselves the hero of the inevitable play/movie/non-fiction blockbuster that will certainly be made from their plight.

Non-Fiction

The first collection of non-fiction by the bestselling author of Fight Club and Diary.

All are spicy, clever dispatches from the frontier between macho and camp

Casts a gleefully amoral eye at the world around him... You couldn't, as the man says, make it up

Comically rueful and tragically bloodshot

An immensely skilful writer. He has a sober, searching intelligence and he examines Hollywood and the prairie states with an unflinching candour and a rare strain of melancholy

Like a noxious Douglas Coupland, Palahniuk charts new-felt and totally contemporary categories of despair

Chuck Palahniuk's world has been, well, different from yours and mine. 
 
The pieces that comprise Non-Fiction prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world of college wrestlers; the underground world of anabolic steroid gobblers; the harrowing circumstances of his father's murder and the trial of his killer - each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of America's most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

Diary

The bestselling author of Fight Club continues his twenty-first century reinvention of the horror novel in this homage to Rosemary's Baby.

His most scarily nihilistic and resonant book since Fight Club

Part Rosemary's Baby, part The Wicker Man... The shocks are shocking and the twists nice and taut

A truly terrifying horror story with some interestingly radical underpinnings

Diary takes the form of a 'coma diary' kept by one Misty Tracy Wilmot as her husband lies senseless in hospital after a suicide attempt. Once she was an art student dreaming of creativity and freedom; now, after marrying Peter at art 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 refurbished and scrawling vile messages all over the walls. Angry homeowners are suing, 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. The canvases are taken away by her mother-in-law and her doctor, who seem to have a plan for Misty - and for all those annoying tourists...

A Walk in Portland, Oregon

Fugitives and Refugees

Here's a writer whose life looks a lot like his fiction

Maybe our generation has found it's Don DeLillo

Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk's tonsils currently reside? 
 
Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? 
 
What goes on at the Scum Center? 
 
How do you get to the Apocalypse Cafe? 
 
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. 
 
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.

Lullaby

'Probably the most entertaining-funny-fascinating book of the year' The Face 
 
By the author of Fight Club

There are more plot ideas in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby than some writers manage in a whole book

Palahniuk starts with a throwaway thought - "what if words could hurt?" - and stretches it until it snaps

A black comic cauldron bubbling with contagious ideas

Mr. Palahniuk further refines his ability to create parables that are as substantial as they are off-the-wall

This is vintage Palahniuk: weird, creepy, twisted, upsetting, and ultimately a great read

Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a 'culling song' - an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way. Lullaby is a comedy/drama/tragedy. In that order. It may also be Chuck Palahniuk's best book yet.

Choke

'Choke is Fight Club for sex addicts' Independent on Sunday 
 
BY THE AUTHOR OF FIGHT CLUB

Palahniuk's grotesque, exaggerated portrait of American society certainly isn't pretty, but it grips like a vice all the same

A wonderful writer with a raw take on modern woes

Mining a dark vein opened by Bret Easton Ellis and George Saunders, Palahniuk specialises in producing nightmarish visions of American society that manage to be both repugnant and hilarious - the reckless brilliance of his imagination keeps you turning the pages

A raw and vital book, punctuated with outrageous, off-the-wall moments

The pungent imagery, the witty twists, the chunky rhythms are great

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. 
 
Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

Invisible Monsters

'Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo' Bret Easton Ellis 
 
By the author of Fight Club

Chuck Paluhniuk is on outstanding writer, who has never failed, in my eyes, at producing beautiful novels… [Invisible Monsters] never fails to shock as you follow the twists and turns of this revenge filled novel

Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo

Palahniuk is one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time. He rearranges Vonnegut's sly humour, DeLillo's mordant social analysis and Pynchon's antic surrealism into a gleaming puzzle palace all his own

She's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. 
 
Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from being 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 place you'll ever want to look. 
 
The narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and fellow model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present and future.

Survivor

'Survivor has, if this is possible, even more millennial angst sparking across the sentence gaps than Fight Club' Esquire 
 
By the Author of Fight Club

A comedy of horrors, a pantomimic romp through America's obsession with secrets and confessions

Immensely entertaining...an extremly funny account of an outsider stuck inside America

Survivor comes bowling forth out of the same dark corner of the mind as Fight Club... Like its predecessor, it is a terminal novel, a novel that applies the firing-squad principle to extort tortured eloquence from its doomed narrator

Brilliant satire and savagely funny, Survivor offers much to admire. Palahniuk displays a swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane's black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult and, like all Creedish younger sons, hired out as a domestic servant, Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally and apocalyptically spiralling out of control.

Chuck Palahniuk

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES 
Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. 
 
Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth. 
 
'Hypnotic, pitiless and told brilliantly' Bret Easton Ellis 
 
'Like a noxious Doug Coupland, Palahiuk charts new-felt and totally contemporary categories of despair' Ali Smith, Guardian

Chuck Palahniuk

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9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

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