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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Books that defined the 1990s

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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. 
 
 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

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.

A BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisation

Fight Club

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

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

Make Something Up

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.

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.

Beautiful You

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?

A billion husbands are about to be replaced.

Doomed

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.

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

Damned

'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.

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

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

Fight Club

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