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by Chuck Palahniuk ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1996

This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because...

Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that's also cynically smart and sharply written.

Palahniuk's insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he's a "guerilla terrorist of the service industry." "Project Mayhem" seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers' soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden's bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient—the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden's cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: "Losing all hope was freedom," and "Everything is falling apart"—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God's attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden's revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-393-03976-5

Page Count: 192

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996

DYSTOPIAN FICTION | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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by Chuck Palahniuk

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Chuck Palahniuk Talks Censored ‘Fight Club’ Ending

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New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

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by Max Brooks

THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM

From the remembrance of earth's past series , vol. 1.

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2014

Remarkable, revelatory and not to be missed.

Strange and fascinating alien-contact yarn, the first of a trilogy from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, young physicist Ye Wenjie helplessly watches as fanatical Red Guards beat her father to death. She ends up in a remote re-education (i.e. forced labor) camp not far from an imposing, top secret military installation called Red Coast Base. Eventually, Ye comes to work at Red Coast as a lowly technician, but what really goes on there? Weapons research, certainly, but is it also listening for signals from space—maybe even signaling in return? Another thread picks up the story 40 years later, when nanomaterials researcher Wang Miao and thuggish but perceptive policeman Shi Qiang, summoned by a top-secret international (!) military commission, learn of a war so secret and mysterious that the military officers will give no details. Of more immediate concern is a series of inexplicable deaths, all prominent scientists, including the suicide of Yang Dong, the physicist daughter of Ye Wenjie; the scientists were involved with the shadowy group Frontiers of Science. Wang agrees to join the group and investigate and soon must confront events that seem to defy the laws of physics. He also logs on to a highly sophisticated virtual reality game called “Three Body,” set on a planet whose unpredictable and often deadly environment alternates between Stable times and Chaotic times. And he meets Ye Wenjie, rehabilitated and now a retired professor. Ye begins to tell Wang what happened more than 40 years ago. Jaw-dropping revelations build to a stunning conclusion. In concept and development, it resembles top-notch Arthur C. Clarke or Larry Niven but with a perspective—plots, mysteries, conspiracies, murders, revelations and all—embedded in a culture and politic dramatically unfamiliar to most readers in the West, conveniently illuminated with footnotes courtesy of translator Liu.

Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7706-7

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014

SCIENCE FICTION

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Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is

Twenty-six books in, the author has made a career of writing about loners, misfits, and deviants. But the man behind these controversial and transgressive fictions is full of surprises.

Every product was carefully curated by an Esquire editor. We may earn a commission from these links.

Four days before I’m supposed to travel to Portland, Oregon to meet Chuck Palahniuk, we’re already plotting a murder. Multiple murders, actually. Palahniuk is texting me from a Columbia High School reunion in Burbank, Washington, from which he graduated in 1980 (it wasn’t technically his reunion but his older sister’s), and among his fellow Coyotes are the bullies who chanted mean shit at him and beat him bloody. “Several will die today,” one text reads. This was a conversation that began nine texts earlier with me saying hello, it’s the writer from Esquire , wanted to touch base , etc., and now, it’s somehow progressed to killing his childhood tormentors. Soon, Palahniuk discovers that “several are dead. I feel cheated.” His solution is, of course, obvious: “Must find and piss on their graves.”

To someone like me, who used to read his work as a twenty-something, this feels quintessentially Palahniukian: darkly funny, shamelessly macabre, and—most crucially—completely straight-faced. In Palahniuk’s fiction, twisted violence and sex occur in a matter-of-fact manner. His infamous short story “Guts,” which used to induce fainting in audience members when Palahniuk read it at events, is a vivid cautionary tale about a teenage boy sitting naked on a pool circulation pump as a means of sexual pleasure, which results in his colon being sucked out of his anus. In Beautiful You , a woman finds herself in a 50 Shades of Grey -type relationship with a megabillionaire who plans to release a line of sex toys for women and uses the protagonist as an experimental subject. In one scene, he has her insert color-coded beads into her vagina (pink) and anus (black) while they dine at a restaurant. The “orgasmic waves” she experiences are too intense, so she runs to the bathroom to pull them out, only she can’t—the beads are magnetized. As her “secretions dripped to the floor, where they’d begun to pool,” another woman has to help her by sucking out the pink bead, like “snake’s venom.”

By the time this text exchange is happening, I’ve spent the better part of a month becoming a Palahniuk completist: miring myself in his menacing diegeses, rife with rape, murder, torture, self-mutilation, suicide, and all manner of gruesome body horror. His latest, Not Forever, But For Now (releasing in early September), is a tour de force of literary debauchery, featuring some truly nasty stuff. Helping him plan the murder of his high school bullies, then, doesn’t seem strange at all. As I texted him then: “I would expect nothing less.”

Less than a week later, I’m in Portland, Oregon, I’m in the passenger seat of Palahniuk’s Prius, and I realize I have no idea where we’re going. I deferred to Palahniuk about where we would conduct the interview, and I neglect to ask as we navigate the city Palahniuk adopted as his own six days after graduating high school in 1980, the place teeming, as he wrote in Fugitives and Refugees , with “the most cracked of the crackpots.”

Chuck Palahniuk has a more significant literary oeuvre than he’s often given credit for, likely because of an unfair association with toxic masculinity, misogyny, and various other social ills typified by Tyler Durden, the impossibly intoxicating antihero at the center of Palahniuk’s breakthrough debut novel Fight Club . It’s true that the majority of his fans are young men, the kind whose dorm room walls are festooned with movie posters featuring, say, Al Pacino, Uma Thurman, and a scowling Brad Pitt clutching a bar of soap, but attempts to link Palahniuk to the recent ascent of men’s rights activists fall apart upon closer examination of the novels. It’s also true that many of his characters possess similar traits, espouse similarly nihilistic or anarchistic philosophies, and behave in similar ways as these misogynist trolls, but this only means that Palahniuk identified the disastrous consequences of enforced masculinity more accurately and earlier than everyone else. To be completely honest, I originally came to Portland to argue in favor of the Palahniuk-to-incel pipeline, but once I was disabused of that premise–first by reading the novels; then by speaking with Palahniuk–I discover something completely unexpected. What becomes clear to me during the eight and a half hours I spend with Palahniuk is that he cares about his characters—about their happiness—much more than I would have assumed, and that his primary objective as a storyteller is the emotional climax a reader can be brought to. The murder? The mayhem? The soap? These are merely his tools, but what he builds with those tools in no way reflects its construction.

Palahniuk is much more subdued in his manner than I expected. He speaks quietly, softly, with a gentleness I associate with patient teachers. His voice and demeanor contain zero trace of menace or even naughtiness. He’s dressed in an understated way, but his clothes fit impeccably, and the interior of his car is as neat as straight bourbon. I can’t envision this Palahniuk pissing on the graves of dead bullies.

At half past noon, we pull into a mostly empty parking lot for what looks like a park. Enormous fir trees are clamoring to be the first to reach the cloudless sky. Urban noise vanishes, replaced by the usual ambience of nature and that human hum we can’t fully eliminate in the “natural” spaces we design and build onto. It’s gorgeous and eerie.

“I’m taking you here to kill you,” Palahniuk says, smiling. This is said without even a joking malice, but instead like an endearment.

The National Sanctuary of our Sorrowful Mother wouldn’t be a bad place to go, honestly. Known locally as the Grotto, it’s 62 acres of towering conifers centered around a ten-story cliff-face out of which a small cavern has been created by dynamite to serve as a Roman Catholic altar, which is festooned with statues, candles, and flowers. More than a dozen rows of pews extend out from the Grotto Cave for the services that regularly occur there. At the end of the plaza, another formidable precipice looms over us, although this one’s manmade: the Chapel of Mary’s façade is tall and flat and wide, mirroring the grandeur of the nearby cliff. A path beyond the chapel, guarded by a comically ineffectual turnstile, leads to an elevator that takes you to the upper gardens and the meditation chapel and vistas of the city, which is, Palahniuk informs me, our destination. Though it’s midday on a bright and warm July Wednesday, the atmosphere is understandably solemn.

When we approach the Chapel of Mary and peer in to glimpse its mural and marble and mosaic-filled interior, I mention that I’m going to snap some photos because my visual memory is so terrible. Very politely, Palahniuk motions for me to be silent, nodding to the handful of attendees inside. He watches them with genuine affection, or at the very least deferential respect. I watch him instead.

Palahniuk is 61. He’s fit, healthy, and stylish in a way one wouldn’t necessarily associate with someone in their seventh decade, but his manner of moving about in the world—patient, deliberate, wholly aware of and attentive to the other people around him—strikes me as something acquired with age. The one other time I saw Palahniuk in real life was in Boston in 2007, when he packed the Coolidge Corner Theatre promoting his novel Rant . I didn’t speak to him that day, only sat in the audience, but he seemed, at 45, to lack some of those qualities. He thrived on that stage, the crowd orchestral to his conductor’s sway. Fans arrived, per Palahniuk’s instruction, decked out in wedding gowns and tuxes, a nod to a demolition derby-style sport called Party Crashing in Rant . It was a raucous affair, as many of Palahniuk’s events are, replete with contests, trivia, beach balls, inflatable animals, and one of the liveliest crowds I’ve ever been a part of. And Palahniuk ate it up, with an almost arrogant ease. My recollection isn’t pristine—it was sixteen years ago, after all—but the Palahniuk standing in front of me, wistfully gazing at a very different group of devotees who worship a very different leader, operates with a humble wisdom. The Grotto, these places of contemplation and reflection, suit him.

Still, it feels like a weird place to discuss a novel about two wealthy brothers who spend their time fucking each other and murdering the staff of their mansion.

Not Forever, But For Now is Palahniuk’s twentieth novel and twenty-sixth book. He’s been a part of the American literary scene for three decades and has produced some of our most fascinating fiction. When Fight Club was published in 1996, Palahniuk emerged as part of a generation of young, transgressive writers—including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Homes, Elizabeth Hurtzel, Douglas Coupland, and Irvine Welsh—whose books depicted drug addicts, pedophiles, murderers, and the sexually promiscuous with unapologetic directness. David Fincher’s 1999 adaptation of Palahniuk’s first novel catapulted him to genuine fame, allowing him to become a writer full-time after years spent working odd jobs like a mechanic or a technical writer—something for which he still expresses gratitude.

Palahniuk’s writing has pissed people off the world over, but even after all that, he hasn’t been cowed in his mission to transgress and to shock. Not Forever, But For Now is among his most disturbing novels, as it contains numerous gruesome and repugnant moments, and it features characters who make Tyler Durden look like Harvey the rabbit.

The brothers at the novel’s center are Otto and Cecil, two ambiguously aged nepo babies living a lavish life in a manor in Wales. When we first meet them, they’re watching a nature documentary about Australia, from which they glean a wholly Palahniukian lesson: a newborn joey has to crawl up its mother’s fur to reach her pouch, unassisted, and “the squirmy, pink thing must rescue itself.” Otto, the more dominant of the pair, explains to Cecil, the narrator, that sometimes a mother kangaroo will flick away one of her offspring “like a lump of nasty snot off her fingers.” She does this, Otto says, “because she hates its puny weakness,” and because “a mummy can always tell when a joey isn’t like the other joeys, why, it’s always going to be a stunted pre-male.”

As Otto and Cecil’s privileged world of affluence is unveiling, a couple of odd and discomfiting phrases appear. The brothers refer to a game called “Winnie-the-Pooh,” which turns out to be a euphemism for sexual dominance (“Will you be my daddy and chase me through the Hundred Acre Wood?”), and they use phrases like “having a go” and “having it off.” These are also sexual euphemisms, obviously, but these terms are so disturbing because they appear in reference to the brothers. As in, “We get back in the car and Otto has a go with me,” and, “Otto pushes me down on the cushions and has it off.” These brothers fuck each other… a lot. They are constantly engaged in some kind of sexual activity, so much so that there’s a recurring joke about the stench of their nursery.

Their sexual deviancy extends beyond each other, as well. In one scene, Cecil demands the nanny “bathe me front and back,” which she initially refuses to do, because, she says, he’s too old and has “all that hair down there.” Cecil insists, threatening her job. While it never explicitly states that what they’re arguing over is her pleasuring him, there’s a moment when Cecil mentions that they “once had a nanny who did it with her mouth.”

When they’re not doing all of that stuff, Otto and Cecil occupy their days by writing sexually charged letters to prison inmates in the hope that, once released, the convicts will come to their manor in search of some Winnie-the-Pooh, at which point the brothers will kill them.

They belong to a family of murderers with Bond villain-level ambitions for global control. Their grandfather hopes to mentor Otto into a successful member of their organization. He occasionally shows up to reprimand the boys for their horrid, unmanly lifestyles and to regale them with tales of his exploits. They are not ordinary contract killers, but rather forces of empire power. They orchestrate what they consider to be necessary events for the betterment of humanity. Otto and Cecil’s family is responsible for, among other major tragedies, 9/11, Kent State, and Jonestown, as well as the deaths of Princess Di, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Phil Hartman, and Sonny Bono. This devious cabal represents “great powers” who control the fate of history, and their reasons for setting these events into motion are the same as all imperial regimes: the expansion and perpetuation of power. Two significant historical moments—that the Grandfather claims are related—receive special attention in the novel, through a lengthy flashback that’s parsed out in small chunks throughout, partly because the scene succinctly lays out the modus operandi of the organization’s history-forging, but also because it contains what I now know is a deeply personal expression of Palahniuk’s arduous life. The two events are the death of Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.

After an elevator to the upper level, Palahniuk and I briefly take in the view of Portland from the Meditation Chapel, with its wall of windows, before finding a bench in the Peace Gardens, where Palahniuk elucidates his passion for what he calls “apostolic fiction,” where a narrator details the thoughts and exploits of a person they love, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby . Palahniuk says, “When you're writing about a character who really admires and loves another character, it’s such a joy. Because so often with my generation, it’s just narratives of snark, where it's just always about people tearing down things. But to have a character writing about the thing that they love—that is absolutely breathtaking. To be with someone who is intelligently praising, and in that Boswell way, saying, I know this great guy, I want to record everything this great guy says, I want you to love the thing I love. Yeah. That is a joy to write.”

Palahniuk is referring to Fight Club , his first and best-known novel. The unnamed narrator so idolizes Tyler Durden because Durden was designed by the narrator himself to be an ideal, a psychological manifestation of everything he wished he would be. This is why Tyler has proven so perniciously stubborn as a hero of alienated young men. You love Tyler because the narrator loves Tyler, and in the film, every detail of Brad Pitt’s physique, style, and attitude were meticulously calibrated to make you admire him. Palahniuk also claims credit (convincingly, I think) for popularizing the pejorative word snowflake , though ironically, his initial use of the term (”you are not special, you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” in Fight Club ) was meant as a debunking of the treatment his generation received from public education, this “all encouraging all the time” celebration of everyone’s individuality as equally special. This technique, in Palahniuk’s view, left him and many of his cohort ill-prepared for adulthood. But what right-wingers and boomers mean by snowflake is weakness: an unwillingness to confront dissent, an intolerance to disagreement, an expectation of privilege. Basically some trigger-warning safe-space wokeness bullshit. To put it another way: Palahniuk targeted the parents who raised their kids to believe in such universal uniqueness, whereas now those same parents seem to take aim at anyone foolish enough to believe them. This, to me, succinctly articulates the gap between Palahniuk’s nuanced satire and the surface-level interpretations of a certain contingent of angry, reactionary men who feel cheated out of something they assume was promised to them.

For his part, Palahniuk laughs when I bring up Fight Club ’s connection to incels. What interested him was what would happen if men had their own version of the Joy Luck Club or the Ya-Ya Sisterhood—and to him, the fact that it would be violent wasn’t even a question. “I just wanted to create this arbitrary club,” he says, because what really mattered was the escalation. “Fight Club has to become Project Mayhem. It has to become this thing that’s beyond our control, a thing you can’t reel back in.”

Not Forever, But For Now is also apostolic fiction. Cecil adores Otto; he’s always telling us how clever Otto is, how wise. Cecil, though, is quite aware of Otto’s evil. In fact, Cecil’s narration deliberately withholds information about Otto from the reader because, as he explains, “I’d rather you embrace Otto as a winning boy.” He’s so protective of his abusive brother that he cares more about creating a positive illusion than revealing the negative truth. Palahniuk chose the word “apostolic” as his name for this narrative form, even though when he defines the term in conversation, he invokes love and admiration. Apostolic, though, refers to religious discipleship—not merely love but worship, proselytization, and devotion. Apostles spread the gospels as missionaries and crusaders. An apostle is stauncher than a lover, and much less prone to doubt and nuance. Love—healthy love, at least—seeks to view its object in all its complexity, flaws and all.

Otto wants Cecil to organize his existence around his needs. “Sometimes,” Cecil tells us, late at night, “Otto stands over my bed” and warns him that, “If I held any suspicion you’d leave me, I’d put a stop to you in an instant.” Cecil is completely under Otto’s spell, a fact Palahniuk emphasizes with a tactic he has used since the beginning of his literary career. “I did the Fight Club trick,” he says, “where the narrator—his quotes are never inside quotation marks. It’s always paraphrased.” Dialogue is one of the most effective ways of communicating character, so its absence keeps someone’s true self at bay. The result is that the reader never hears the narrator when he interacts with others, giving him little definition as a character, even on the page. Cecil’s liberation, then, is tied to Otto’s destruction. Cecil can only thrive when the one he loves dies.

It’s easy to dismiss Palahniuk’s fiction as provocation for provocation’s sake, as an indulgence in decadence and debauchery, providing as much visceral pleasure (but as little artistic quality) as gritty horror movies and bloody video games. It wouldn’t be hard—I know, I’ve done it—to dismiss his novels as moody stopovers between young adult fiction and adult literature, like a reader’s goth phase. His work is dark, disturbing, and unsparingly satirical, and it’s filled with an eclectic array of information. When Palahniuk attended college at the University of Oregon, he studied journalism, which is apparent in his novels. One of his trademarks is providing fascinating facts about niche, underground subjects. How to make bombs. The logistics of pornography. The effects of drugs. The means by which Hollywood foley artists create sounds. Palahniuk lends his stories a conspiratorial verisimilitude with these brief lessons, as if nudging you and letting you in on a little-known secret.

Moreover, the novels lob savagely satirical bon mots at their targets, many of which are represented by the characters. This can lead to flimsy, stand-in cyphers who function as tools of the novelist’s subtextual aims rather than full-fledged individuals with convincing agency. Palahniuk’s characters, as he ages, have become more and more human, and their growth more central to the arc. His previous novel, The Invention of Sound , features two protagonists mired in a wild narrative involving missing children, recorded murders, and Hollywood corruption; the finale is a scene of harrowing violence between these two characters. A contextless description of this ending would not do it justice, as what’s happening underneath the violence is an incredibly moving and meaningful conclusion to both characters’ stories. The pieces are disturbing, but the whole is heartbreaking. As a novelist, pathos is now Palahniuk’s primary intent.

I ask him if he thinks readers or critics recognize the emotional component of his novels.

“I don’t think 99% of them do,” he says, “And it’s painful. I don’t blame them for not wanting to go there.”

There is the true depths of a character’s catharsis, a confrontation with their deep, troubled selves. One scene in Not Forever, But For Now involves Otto and Cecil hunting around for “shy, blushing, effete types we can coerce into giving a ride.” They find a guileless boy named Digby, who despite Otto’s unambiguous remarks remains unaware of their intentions. When Cecil spots him, he assesses his appearance:

The lad looks to be so alone that he’ll do human toilet and tell himself this was love, why, he’ll do anything we ask just so long as he’s not ignored and left to stand there alone. He’s a baby animal so unwanted he’ll do rusty trombone and risk his life—risk catching hepatitis and AIDS—to ward off another moment of being some pre-male nobody set under a bus-stop light in the middle of cold nowhere.

When Palahniuk talks about this moment, I sense a real note of resignation in his voice. “That Digby scene is the most human scene I’ve ever written,” he says. “But nobody will appreciate that. Nobody will appreciate the pathos of that scene, because they’ll fix on the sort of dirtiness of it.”

He’s hurt. It hurts him that people rarely grasp the emotional punch of his writing, that they aren’t more moved by the grounded feelings and earned catharses of his characters. Readers don’t see how much his own personal anguish and history informs his fiction. But they can’t. They aren’t privy to enough of Palahniuk’s life to make the connections. They’re understandably distracted by the heightened plots and grotesque imagery and lurid themes. The emotions are there, certainly, but sometimes the visceral intensity overpowers the soulful underpinnings.

In an essay in Stranger Than Fiction , Palahniuk writes that Fight Club is “less a novel than an anthology of my friends’ lives. I do have insomnia and wander with no sleep for weeks. Angry waiters I know mess with food. They shave their heads. My friend Alice makes soap. My friend Mike cuts single frames of smut into family features.” Lullaby was composed in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, but it would be impossible to discern this from the novel’s plot. In 1999, Palahniuk’s father was murdered, along with a woman he was seeing, by the woman’s ex-boyfriend. During the killer’s trial, Palahniuk struggled over whether they should seek the death penalty, ultimately writing a letter recommending a death sentence. Lullaby is about a culling song that ends the life of anyone who hears it; words that kill.

Palahniuk crafts his art with such personal investment and hard-won wisdom. He immortalizes his friends and navigates his grief, incorporating private pain and experience. And like many artists, he struggles to accept a fundamental disparity in presenting work: that what the art the world sees speaks only to a fraction of the struggle required to complete it, meaning they necessarily underestimate its ingenuity and emotional complexity.

But Not Forever, But For Now contains some of Palahniuk’s most personal expressions of himself, which brings us back to Judy Garland and the Stonewall Riots.

For the past 30 years—since before he’d ever published anything—Palahniuk has been with his husband Mike. They live on a large property outside of Portland, where they’ve lived for the better part of two decades. Palahniuk is protective of Mike and doesn’t like him being written about all that much, so I only want to characterize Mike the way Palahniuk does, as I did not meet or speak with Mike.

Mike mostly doesn’t read Palahniuk’s books (although he did read and was moved by Lullaby ), but he acts as Palahniuk’s sounding board for ideas. “Mike is really smart in terms of cultural precedent,” Palahniuk says, “and he can say, ‘No, that’s too much like this thing a million years ago.’ Because God forbid you get forty pages into something and realize, oh, that was a Simpsons episode.” But if Palahniuk can get Mike to smile, “that little smile like, you bastard, don’t do that ,” or, even better, if he can get him to laugh, “that’s the ultimate green light.”

The nefarious firm of murderers in Not Forever, But For Now must kill Judy Garland, the Grandfather explains to her on June 22, 1969, so that the Stonewall Riots will take place. This is a regularly recurring (and most certainly apocryphal) story about Stonewall. The idea is that the funeral of gay icon Judy Garland, which took place the same night as the riots, set a gloomy mood to the evening and thus contributed to or perhaps even caused the events that unfolded. It probably originated with Charles Kaiser’s 1997 book The Gay Metropolis , but historians don’t grant the theory much credence. In her book The Gay Revolution , Lillian Faderman spends four pages considering, via interviewees, the numerous factors that contributed to the events, and Garland isn’t mentioned at all. But Palahniuk is using this myth more in the sense that Christopher Bram invokes in his book on gay writers, Eminent Outlaws : “People want to connect the death of Garland with the riots, but no mourners appear to have been present at Stonewall. The juxtaposition is only a symbolic coincidence (yet it’s hard to say exactly what it symbolizes).” Others, like activist Bob Kohler, who was present at Stonewall, totally objected to the notion, “because it trivializes the whole thing.”

But it’s more than that. The Grandfather tells Judy Garland why on earth the powers that be would want something like the Stonewall riots to occur, and it goes something like this: “the population explosion was planned” by this ruling cabal because they “needed more humans to constantly vacuum clean the environment.” These expendable hordes will “act as traps to collect and store really harmful germs and viruses such as HIV and hepatitis, thus making those bugs less of a threat to better humans.” But “a slave class,” as Grandfather refers to them, must be controlled so that they don’t take over. Lucky for Grandfather’s firm, “a really ripping science-based solution presented itself.” That is, “the mid-century explosion of styrene and isoprene and vinyl chloride” from the plastics industry caused a birthrate spike of “fey, feeble, polyurethan-defected things.” Gay men is what he means, though he never refers to them that way. Instead it's “PCB-poisoned pre-males” or “this plastics-infused population of eunuchs.” If a growing community of excluded and ostracized people were to discover the truth—that not only have carcinogenic compounds produced “deviant, plastics-inspired impulses,” but that these impulses will deny them “traditional means of advancement,” so that they will “accrue wealth with no offspring”—they might understandably revolt, but they would most certainly sue. At first, Grandfather’s firm decided to employ shame to keep these “wispy, lispy” “bred-to die drones” from acknowledging their sexuality, let alone investigating its possible causes. This worked for a while, but a better solution was needed.

Hence Stonewall. Stonewall and the birth of the gay rights movement would shift the narrative “from shame to pride.” Now, these “tight-pants pre-males” will “embrace their engineered disabilities as badges of honor,” which will, according to Grandfather, result in the same unwillingness to find a cause, or even to consider the idea that their sexuality has a cause, thereby keeping them from discovering the truth and bringing down the global economy.

These are all, from Judy Garland on down, offensive ways to depict gay men and the legacy of Stonewall. Not that it’s any more objectionable than a lot of the stuff in Palahniuk’s fiction, but this relates to an aspect of his life he isn’t very public about, so I was curious what he had to say about this part of the novel.

“God, it’s going to be tough to articulate this,” he says. “Being same-sex-attracted in the tiny town I grew up in was really a dangerous thing. And when I came out to my mother, she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody. Don’t tell anybody, please. They will kill you.’ And I never came out to my father. Then he was murdered in ‘99. So that was always a huge incomplete thing.”

“How old were you when you came out to your mother?” I ask.

“I was sixteen,” he says. He repeats: “And she said, ‘Don’t tell anybody, because they will kill you.’ They will kill you. Because when she was a teenager, somebody in the town was suspected of being homosexual, and his house was burned down, and he was driven out of town. It was such a horrible ordeal that she was terrified it would happen to me.

“And then I age into this culture,” he continues, “where if you aren’t completely out in every aspect of your public life and personal life, then you’re somehow damaged and shameful and raw. So within my lifetime I’m supposed to transition from being a person that has really created this whole guardedness not just for my own protection, but for the protection of the people I love and for my family who are still in that small town. Then I’m expected to automatically step out of that into a kind of joyous, flag-waving outness that is completely at odds with the entire way I’ve been raised, where that was my shell and my armor. You don’t just give that up. You don’t give that up overnight. And people say if you don’t give that up overnight, then you’re self-hating, all these wrong things. So I’m fucked either way. I’m just trying to be one person and live a life. And I’m sorry: I’m just not ready to be completely out and just put it all out there.”

I anticipated Palahniuk citing the corporate commodification of Pride or the conservative backlash that came with it—but I didn’t expect such a personally anguished reason. Then I remember the bullies from high school that he and I plotted to kill, the ones who chanted “Pal-ah-niuk! Suck my dick!” at him while they assaulted him. I think too of the narrator of Fight Club in relation to Tyler Durden—the meek, closeted drone versus the uninhibited, flamboyant hero. I think of the disdain Otto and Cecil have for the weak joeys, how the language they use is not theirs but the Grandfather’s, who has taught them to hate themselves. And I recall, too, how Palahniuk’s fictional milieu tends towards loners who resent the legacy they were born into, who seek out deviant pleasure from disreputable sources, who are made to feel guilty for something they didn’t choose. I see Palahniuk’s anger at all that was withheld from him in his youth that now exists in plentitude. Even though those things no longer mean what they might have to him at sixteen, he’s now expected to be grateful for them. He’s no longer allowed to be afraid.

They will kill you .

Now it’s no surprise at all that Palahniuk cares so deeply for his twisted creations—who else is going to love them? Sure, they’re thieves and con artists and cheats, they’re druggies and sex addicts and adrenaline junkies, and they’re murderers and rapists and villains—but Palahniuk’s novels serve as a haven for them to be their true, deviant selves, because he was never given one himself. These extremist misfits are his life’s work; not the novels, or the over-the-top stories, or the abrasive humor and the controversial satire. It’s Cecil and Mitzi and Madison and Carl and Pygmy and Tender and Joe’s Raging Bile Duct. In their horrific, transgressive, and misunderstood behavior, these outcasts act in his stead to embrace a selfhood he wasn’t allowed, arrive at a catharsis he never experienced, or get retribution on enemies he could only joke about. Like any great novelist, Palahniuk adores his darlings; it’s just that his darlings kill.

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The Men Who Still Love “Fight Club”

By Peter C. Baker

A group of men standing with character Tyler Durden in the foreground

Twenty years ago this fall, David Fincher’s “ Fight Club ” went into wide release, drawing moviegoers into a tale of disaffected American men who chase authenticity by pummelling the shit out of one another in poorly lit basements. In the course of the film, these men expand into low-grade pranks and vandalism, and eventually form a terrorist cell called Project Mayhem that plants bombs in skyscrapers. The film, based on a relatively unknown 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk , took the top spot at the box office its opening weekend, but then quickly fizzled. On DVD, however, it found a second life, selling millions. Today, men still quote “Fight Club,” still discuss what the movie really means, and still dress like its characters for Halloween. In the debates surrounding the release of Todd Phillips’s “ Joker ”—another movie about lost men rising up—“Fight Club” was one of the most reached-for comparisons. The movie has become part of the contemporary mass-cultural canon through which large numbers of men try to think through masculinity.

The first sign that “Fight Club” might inspire men to do anything other than quote “Fight Club” on their Facebook walls came in the mid-two-thousands, with the rise of the “seduction community.” These were groups of men searching together—sometimes in live seminars, but increasingly via online Listservs—for an objectively reliable set of techniques that would maximize their chances of getting women in bed. These groups had existed below the cultural radar for decades, well before “Fight Club.” In 2005, they received a new level of attention when Neil Strauss published “ The Game ,” a memoir/investigation about his time living in a Los Angeles group house devoted to the refinement of seduction techniques. Strauss attempted to engineer his own transformation from, in the lexicon of his housemates, “AFC” (average frustrated chump) to “PUA” (pickup artist) to “PUG” (pickup guru). Though the book ended with him taking a critical view of the PUA experience, its publication—plus a wave of bemused media coverage—brought new legions of curious men to pickup artistry and, by extension, to a world view that framed interactions between men and women as a scientifically hackable quest for maximum sex with minimal emotional investment.

In the years that followed, I became a regular lurker on message boards not just in the PUA world but also across the networks of male resentment to which pickup artistry frequently functioned as a gateway drug: “men’s rights” activists, the anti-feminist hive called the Red Pill, incels , the amorphous “ alt-right .” Browsing through this world, I saw “Fight Club” references and offhand worship of Brad Pitt’s character, Tyler Durden, all the time. Tyler is an alpha male who does what he wants and doesn’t let anyone stand in his way; “Fight Club,” then, was a lesson in what you had to do to stop being a miserable beta like the film’s other main character, a frustrated white-collar office worker played by Edward Norton.

There was little discussion on these boards of how Tyler is ultimately revealed to be a hallucination who exists only in the Norton character’s mind: a projection cooked up by his subconscious to yank him out of an existential malaise of alienating corporate work, condo payments, and IKEA catalogues. In the final scene, Norton’s character “kills” Tyler, implicitly recognizing—and picking—a path between mindless middle-class consumerism and the nihilistic will to power of the terrorist. This act is crucial to the movie’s most articulate defenders: proof that “Fight Club” functions as a critique of Tyler, not a valorization. But when I saw this element of the film acknowledged online, it was usually presented as a thematic flaw, or a sop to the demands of big-studio moviemaking. No one was naming himself after Norton’s character. In fact, Norton’s character doesn’t have a name.

Over the summer, I talked about the enduring influence of “Fight Club” with Harris O’Malley, who runs a dating-advice Web site called Paging Dr. NerdLove. O’Malley offers dating advice “to geeks of all stripes”: relationship tips geared toward fans of video games, comic books, sci-fi, and the like, formulated with an eye toward steering people away from the appeal of PUA-type misogynistic snake oil. In the e-mails he receives and the one-on-one coaching sessions that he gives, O’Malley told me that “Fight Club” comes up so regularly that he has come to expect it. A lot of people who contact him for advice, he says, are “young disaffected men who feel they’ve done everything they were told to do, but nothing is happening. And it’s slowly starting to dawn on them that the rewards they were promised are never going to appear, certainly not in the way they were promised. ‘Fight Club’ and ‘The Matrix’ seem to provide a lot of meaning. They’re both about social malaise, and they’re both about people waking up.”

In one of the most-quoted scenes of “Fight Club,” Tyler bemoans the sunken fate of masculinity in late capitalism:

Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. Goddammit! An entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables, slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars—but we won’t. We’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

In theory, O’Malley said, “Fight Club” was a cautionary tale about where the adrenaline rush of “waking up” can take you. Tyler starts by preaching empowerment and authenticity but ends up sowing violence and terror, demanding cult-like subservience from the men he claims to be liberating. Despite this, O’Malley said, “I do meet a lot of people who feel like they should be more like Tyler.” They also talk about the appeal of joining a band of brothers united by purpose. “Fincher does his job too well,” O’Malley said. “He sells why it was tempting to fall for the cult of Tyler. But he doesn’t quite show the horror of where that gets you. Or, for some people, that’s not the part of the movie that sticks.”

Recently, when I checked out Palahniuk’s novel from my local library, the librarian, a woman in her thirties, visibly struggled to hide her displeasure. She had bad memories, she explained, of an ex-boyfriend who badgered her not just to watch the movie and read the book but also to acknowledge its genius. Experiences like these seem to be fairly widespread, and are referred to often on social media. Of course, “Fight Club” (both the book and the movie) has its share of female fans. But it’s also a symbol for certain insistent myopias of masculinity. The story has just one female character of any significance: Marla Singer (portrayed in the film by Helena Bonham Carter). The nameless narrator pines for Marla, though we never see him getting to know her well; Tyler uses her for acrobatic sex followed by emotional neglect. What does it mean for a man to tell his girlfriend that this , of every movie in the world, is his favorite, or the one with the most to say about gender today? Among women who get in touch with Dr. NerdLove, O’Malley told me, “It’s kind of, like, Yeah, if his favorite author is Bret Easton Ellis , his favorite movie is ‘Fight Club,’ and he wants to talk about Bitcoin or Jordan Peterson —these are all warning signs.”

Over the summer, I had a series of phone calls with “Fight Club” enthusiasts: the type of superfans with “Fight Club” tattoos and pets named after “Fight Club” characters. In my conversations with this completely unscientific sample of men with fierce attachments to the film, their focus was overwhelmingly on the movie’s first act: on the nameless protagonist’s sense of ennui and adriftness; his mistaken assumption that endless work hours or the purchases that they enabled him to make will bring him meaning; his intertwined currents of emptiness and longing. One man described how “Fight Club” helped him toward the realization that he didn’t have to work all the time, and didn’t have to worry so much about what other people thought about his life choices. Another talked about how the movie helped motivate him to specialize in existentialism when he pursued a master’s degree in psychology—and, eventually, to write and self-publish a novel about a bitter office worker who, instead of joining Project Mayhem, goes into therapy. At first, the office worker hates therapy, but eventually his sessions help him work his way to a new level of honesty about the disconnect between what he wants from the (imperfect, inherently limiting) world and how he is actually living.

To my mind, stories like these—stories of men driven to take some ownership of their fate, but without seeking out opportunities to inflict pain on others—are more interesting and vital than anything in “Fight Club.” But how many people would want to watch these stories? Sitting in the theatre watching “ Joker ,” I felt only despair. The movie presents us with Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill social outcast—a white man, perhaps inevitably—so neglected and maltreated by the world that his recourse to violence is all but guaranteed. If jumping from one movie to another were possible, he would be a great candidate for Project Mayhem. But, just as “Fight Club” admits that Project Mayhem is a misguided bridge too far without showing more than a sliver of interest in alternatives, “Joker” presents a world so broken that a nihilistic, existential lashing out—coupled with a hateful grin for the world that forced your hand—has become the only way for a lost man to assert his humanity. By the end of October, “Joker” was already the world’s highest-grossing R-rated theatrical release of all time.

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The Chicago Band Whitney and the Fear of Being “Too Indie”

By Inkoo Kang

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Fight Club Spoke to Me

Twenty-five years later, a novel that shouldn’t have resonated still does..

A few months ago, a friend and I were hanging out beside an abandoned baseball field reflecting on the hypermasculine activities we loved before we came out. I, for instance, loved — “loved” — paintball and Maglites and Anna Nicole Smith, and I continue to fawn over unhinged action movies, those of the Cruise and Cage variety. I obsessed over these things partly to hide my ongoing doubt about my assigned gender identity. My strategy was simple: Like something masculine coded, convince everyone I was a boy, including myself. As a teenager, I loved the novels of Chuck Palahniuk, especially Fight Club , the essential book about the nihilistic rage of aimless men. That made perfect sense to my friend but not for the reasons I expected. “I knew so many so many trans people who loved Fight Club before they came out,” she said, so nonchalant I felt as if I should have already known. After a few weeks’ obsessing over her comment, I bought a new copy of the novel. I had donated my original a decade ago.

Perhaps there’s a simple explanation for trans people loving Fight Club : A lot of people loved Fight Club . But I’m convinced there’s a deeper, less immediate reason. Transformation plays a vital role in the novel. The men who join Fight Club seek to eradicate everything superficially male about their lives — albeit through hypermasculine tactics — and the person you see in Fight Club, the narrator states, “is not who they are in the real world.” Fight Club does two things very well. It captures the colicky malaise of men, and it pursues a truth that is hard to confront: We would like to be someone else. Before I came out as trans, this was not a truth I could avoid.

It has been 25 years since the publication of Fight Club , and its impact remains easy to spot: Fight Club chapters have sprouted up across the world over that time, academics have debated the novel at conferences and performed interpretive dances, and you’ve probably heard someone say “The First Rule of [blank] is don’t talk about [blank]” more times than you care to remember. Only eight months ago, the U.S. faced an attack on the Capitol building led mostly by angry white men looking to reappoint their leader to office. Derailing the democratic process is a fitting task for Project Mayhem, the cult that evolves out of Fight Club.

I first came to Fight Club the way many people did: through the movie. The summer I turned 12, my older cousins named all their video-game characters Tyler Durden. I was eager to get the reference — they refused to explain it to me — so I ordered the film through my mom’s satellite subscription. It did not instill in me a desire to fight or become a Real Man. The literal physics of the final gunshot confused me. How could someone kill his persona by shooting himself in the mouth? I looked to my cousins for answers. They insisted the movie was merely too smart for me.

Fight Club reentered my life in high school when I enrolled in a class called “Filming the Novel” — it was the hottest (easiest) course in school. The semester consisted of reading novels, then watching the adaptations before taking quizzes noting the differences between the films and the books.

In high school, I spent my afternoons at Borders listening to sample tracks from indie bands and splurging on Wes Anderson DVDs. The literature section, however, seemed like a threateningly feminine space — my best friend was a girl, and she read all the time — but Fight Club gave me an excuse to drift among the book aisles, flipping through the opening chapters of Palahniuk’s Choke and Survivor before testing out other books that had been adapted into movies: Alex Garland’s The Beach , Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho . In Palahniuk’s books, nothing ever went unsaid. Every purile and wretched idea seemed to make it onto the page. As a teenager fenced in by curfews and homework and groundings, I was enamored of anything that flouted social conventions, and as a pretentious teenager, I loved finding these ideas in novels. You might expect me to say I was drawn to Invisible Monsters , Palahniuk’s novel about trans fashion models; after reading the flap copy, though, I avoided the book. I feared what reading it might say about me. Just the sight of it made my stomach tighten with shame.

In college, I decided to become a Serious Writer and abandoned Palahniuk. As I fell for the work of Mavis Gallant and Deborah Eisenberg and James Baldwin and others, my love for novels like Fight Club embarrassed me. How could something so pulpy and corny spur my love of reading? But I’ve come to accept that we rarely get to choose what speaks to us on a subcutaneous, languageless level and that hiding my love for the novel meant hiding something essential about me. Since childhood, I had been adept at hiding essential parts of myself, fearing friends and family and partners would abandon me if they knew who I was. And who was I? A writer who loved pulpy Palahniuk novels. A Ph.D. student who skipped class to watch basketball games. A nonbinary person pretending I was a man.

While writing my novel, The Atmospherians , I began to accept that I could no longer hide. Over the first few drafts, I was living in Houston, married and assumed cis, but on the rare weekends I spent on my own, I would toss on dresses while revising scenes in “an attempt to understand” Sasha, the female narrator of the book. At least, that’s what I would have told my wife if she came home or if a neighbor spied me through the windows. But I knew why I was wearing the dresses. I didn’t want to understand Sasha. I wanted to be myself.

My novel is about a pair of friends, Sasha and Dyson, who create a cult to reform problematic men. When I started the book, I set out to imagine a less destructive form of masculinity, to turn Fight Club on its head. Palahniuk’s vision of masculinity suggests that an authentic man — the true man underneath the bourgeois facade — can emerge through violence and self-sacrifice. I wanted to believe in the opposite, that, through writing, I could create a version of masculinity a man would want to inhabit. But my problem was never my style of manhood or that I hadn’t yet become the right type of man; it was that people assumed I was male and that I encouraged this out of convenience and fear. As I revised my novel, I became less interested in reimagining masculinity than in dropping my performance of manhood. My excuse — that I dressed femme to understand Sasha — became too taxing to harbor. Seven months before I finished the book, I came out to my partner and loved ones as trans.

I did not set out to write a trans novel, and many readers would say that I haven’t. My book does not center trans characters — though some have read Dyson’s childhood as that of a closeted trans woman — and in terms of representation, it has little in common with novels like Detransition, Baby and Summer Fun and Confessions of the Fox and Future Feeling . But the novel unconsciously expresses my desire to escape the gender binary. In The Atmospherians , characters suffer because people in their lives have imposed strict gender expectations upon them. That gender is a violent performance is hardly an original concept. See: Butler, Judith. But as Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun , told me recently, it was obvious to her that the book was “ fucking trans ” only a few chapters in. Another trans reader described the novel as “ooz[ing] dysphoria.”

Fight Club also oozes dysphoria. The hypermasculine aspects of the novel haven’t vanished since I read it at 17. There remains something unnervingly fratty in both the tone and the plot. Men raised by women who are tired of discussing their feelings come together through violence and terrorism. Palahniuk’s instructions for building bombs and rendering soap and deflecting class-action lawsuits all give off — I’m sorry — a mansplain-y vibe. The members of Project Mayhem are encouraged to buy guns. Nothing says “man” like a gun.

However, as I reread Fight Club this summer, the narrator’s longing for a more authentic life spoke to my lifelong gender dysphoria. I too harbored a secret; I presided over a club of one that I refused to ever discuss. Who I was when I wore dresses was not the person who entered the world to teach or grab drinks.

Twenty-five years after the novel’s publication, we continue breaking the first rule of Fight Club. That’s not because the book expertly captures the nihilistic resentment of being a man or because it is cryptically trans. Fight Club takes for granted an inexhaustible fear of modern life: We are not who we present to the world. In the book, this fear draws the narrator toward gruesome extremes from which he cannot recover. In my own life, this fear helped me embrace the person I wished to become. Over the past year, I have, gradually, found a Durden-esque confidence wearing the types of dresses the narrator’s love interest, Marla Singer, might steal from a laundromat. For the first time in my life, who I am for the world aligns with the person I once refused to discuss.

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Read the very first reviews of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club .

Fight Club , Chuck Palahniuk’s era-defining debut novel about a load of disaffected men beating the bejesus out of each other in order to feel alive, was first published twenty-seven years ago today.

The book rapidly gained a cult following, was adapted into one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s (despite an initial failure at the box office), and, of course, originated the modern pejorative use of the word “snowflake.”

Here’s what the very first reviews had to say about “Gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities.”

I don’t want to die without any scars.

“A volatile, brilliantly creepy satirefilled with esoteric tips for causing destruction, Fight Club marks Chuck Palahniuk’s debut as a novelist. Ever wonder how to pollute a plumbing system with red dye, or inject an ATM machine with axle grease or vanilla pudding? Along with instructions for executing such quirky acts of urban terrorism, Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing. The novel’s unnamed 30-year-old narrator is a chronic insomniac who lives in an unnamed city, works as a ‘recall campaign coordinator’ for an auto maker and suffers from a pervasive sense of anomie. To raise his spirits and help him sleep, he attends support groups for the seriously ill. At a testicular-cancer meeting, he meets Marla Singer, a ‘faker’ like himself who is ‘lost inside.’ In Marla’s presence, the narrator loses his ability to ‘hit bottom’ and ‘be saved,’ so he seeks out a new release. He finds ‘service industry terrorist’ Tyler Durden, who splices sex-organ scenes into G-rated films and commits atrocities against food in an upscale hotel. Upping the ante, the narrator and Tyler form a club where young men beat each other into comas. Fueled by a nihilistic fervor and financed by a soap-making operation that uses fat culled from liposuction, the Fight Club grows into an anarchic cult set on destroying society through terrorist acts. Palahniuk’s staccato sentences and one-sentence paragraphs convey a sense of instability; his constant repetition—’nothing is static,’ ‘everything is falling apart’—achieves a sectlike brainwashing effect. By the time the narrator begins to grasp the true depth of Tyler’s perversity, it is too late to save himself. But eventually, through an act of self-effacement, he finds, if not peace, at least a refuge.”

– Karen Angel, The Washington Post , December 1, 1996

“In the world of Fight Club , healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It’s a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers ‘just as long as they have to.’ And it’s a world where ‘nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual.’ Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk’s first novel is gen X’s most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It’s also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel.”

–Thomas Gaughan, Booklist , 1996

“Brutal and relentless debut fiction takes anarcho-S&M chic to a whole new level—in a creepy, dystopic, confrontational novel that’s also cynically smart and sharply written.

Palahniuk’s insomniac narrator, a drone who works as a product recall coordinator, spends his free time crashing support groups for the dying. But his after-hours life changes for the weirder when he hooks up with Tyler Durden, a waiter and projectionist with plans to screw up the world—he’s a ‘guerilla terrorist of the service industry.’ ‘Project Mayhem’ seems taken from a page in The Anarchist Cookbook and starts small: Durden splices subliminal scenes of porno into family films and he spits into customers’ soup. Things take off, though, when he begins the fight club—a gruesome late-night sport in which men beat each other up as partial initiation into Durden’s bigger scheme: a supersecret strike group to carry out his wilder ideas. Durden finances his scheme with a soap-making business that secretly steals its main ingredient–the fat sucked from liposuction. Durden’s cultlike groups spread like wildfire, his followers recognizable by their open wounds and scars. Seeking oblivion and self-destruction, the leader preaches anarchist fundamentalism: ‘Losing all hope was freedom,’ and ‘Everything is falling apart’—all of which is just his desperate attempt to get God’s attention. As the narrator begins to reject Durden’s revolution, he starts to realize that the legendary lunatic is just himself, or the part of himself that takes over when he falls asleep. Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs.

This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It’s dangerous because it’s so compelling.”

– Kirkus , August 1, 1996

“Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk’s apocalyptic first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator’s condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world’s tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk’s utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice.”

– Publishers Weekly , August 19, 1996

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Book review: ‘Fight Club’ by Chuck Palahniuk

(contains spoilers. duh it’s 24 years old).

This book review was written prior to this website transitioning to AI-written reviews by Buddy the BookBot. This review is the opinions of Kirstie, the human.

Alright, alright – so I’m a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk and I’ve never read Fight Club. This book was only written 5 years after I was born (brace yourself – these book reviews might become even LESS timely because I read what I want, damnit.) What in the Tyler-Durden-lickin-Marla-repenting-spitting-in-rich-peoples-food-Sam-hell-is-this?

I don’t know why I never read it. Maybe because I really loved the film and I figured the novel couldn’t measure up to it. Or maybe it was because of this unconscious aversion I have to things I ‘should have’ read by now, or ‘should watch’ – Tiger King fans, I’m looking at you.

Fully aware that this is a very alienating and sanctimonious aversion, but I just can’t help it.

So, finally cracked the spine of Fight Club (well, the digital spine of my ebook) and sat down to drink in the marvellous Chuck Palahniuk-ness of this, his seminal work. My friends, I finished it pretty bummed.

Maybe I’d built it up in my head, and maybe I was looking for the familiar ebb and flow of the film – but my conclusion was that Fight Club’s storyline just makes for a better cinematic piece than a novel (even when the novel is clearly written to be filmic.)

It was thrilling in a way to see the teachings that Chuck gives in ‘ Consider This: The moments in my writing life after which everything was different’ used quite clearly, in black and white, to drive the story. It’s been a good few years since I properly studied literature, and even then it wasn’t the study of creative writing, so it was cool to see some of his biggest advice used systematically and carefully, in what is otherwise a book with a plot that careens all over the place.

For instance:

Not only does he include the sacrifice of the secondary character (Big Bob) at the end of the second act, he also includes the murder of the rebel and the sacrifice of the ‘good guy’. Spoiler alert – he stands out from this time-old structure by making them the same person!
He builds a new world order. Invites you into a club with new rules, and invites you to learn them and share them. To that end, he:
Implements the ‘chorus’. The repetitive phrase that marks the movement to the next scene, keeping your audience engaged while setting out expectation and natural pauses
Uses lists to give authority to the author and the narrator
Setting himself a clock to finish the novel by, from the very moment the book begins with the countdown to the bomb going off
Ends dialogue with active verbs (I get a little nauseous when I hear them used now because of Trump, but they’re very effective in adding a punch to the end of a sentence)
Has the characters to address themselves in third person where they can pass particularly harsh judgement i.e. Marla shouting to the police sent to her suicide scene that: “The girl is infectious human waste”.
Making each chapter work as a standalone piece (in fact, the whole book was spawned from a short story about waiters soiling their rich customer’s food), eliminating the presence of any unnecessary detail.

And I do firmly believe, having read his book on writing, that this is fantastic advice. These are all ways in which we can improve your writing – but funnily enough, I didn’t see it realised as expertly as I’d hoped. Well, it was 24 years ago, he was just warming up , I hear you cry. Yeah, yeah. And his later works have shown that he is capable of implementing this in a much more natural way – for example, his work ‘Choke’ which remains one of my favorites. However, as you can see by my previous review for ‘Damned’, he can miss the mark in his pursuit for quirky writing.

Chuck mentions himself in ‘Consider This’ , that reviewers of Fight Club initially told him they would get super frustrated with the plot and writing style, on occasion literally throwing the book across the room, and then returning to it because they had to know how it ended. I’m not sure you should ever write something that makes reviewers want to get as far away from your book as possible, even if you do return to it out of curiosity. The reading experience wasn’t particularly pleasurable, and on a few occasions I put it down without wanting to finish it at all.

Countdowns in particular were a little overdone in this novel. From the start, it is clear that things are ramping towards a conclusion (the minutes ticking down to the moment the bomb explodes), but it is repeated at every opportunity, for multiple reasons until it actually starts to lose its potency. By the end, I was willing the countdown to finally end so that I could finish the book.

However, there are bits of writing within Fight Club which absolutely sparkle – from the narrator identifying singular parts of the body to identify with multiple times over the course of the book, out of a stack of newspapers, “I am Joe’s raging bile duct” , to Marla’s unapologetic darkness, “I want to have your abortion” , to shreds of wisdom, “It’s your life and it’s ending one minute at a time” , to the singular scenes such as the waiters and the hold up where Tyler convinces a barkeep to go to veterinary school. All things which feel original, and weighted and brimming with potential.

Unfortunately, the rest of the novel just didn’t do it for me. Sorry teacher.

I imagine all of y’all have read Fight Club, so let me know what you thought! And if you haven’t read it – get yourself a copy and see whether you agree!

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Chuck Palahniuk on His New Serial Killer Novel and the One Part He Didn’t Like in the ‘Fight Club’ Movie

By William Earl

William Earl

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Chuck Palahniuk ‘s just-released 20th novel, “ Not Forever, But For Now ,” is dark and twisted, even for him. The author of “Fight Club” and “Choke” profiles two Welch brothers named Otto and Cecil, who squander their days away in a mansion performing sexual acts on each other and both committing and plotting murder. Yet their grandfather hopes to recruit them to the family business of changing the course of history through committing atrocities like the death of Princess Diana and 9/11. Palahniuk spoke to Variety about the subversive ideas he turns into books, censorship in the United States and the one thing he didn’t love from the film adaptation of “Fight Club.”

Popular on Variety

I never want to be overtly political, but in this case, I wanted to really look at empire and whether the next generation is going to be willing to take on the kind of mass slaughter and assassination that keeps empire in place. So you’ve got these two little boys: They’ll kill the servants, but will they go out in the world and kill huge numbers of people just to keep that crenelated house over their heads?

How did you select the real world events that Otto and Cecil’s family is responsible for?

The very first one that gave me the idea was I was driving through Burbank to an appointment in December and passing somebody’s front yard. I saw this enormous Christmas display of wise men and sheep and shepherds and everything. It was the blow up kind, but the blowers weren’t working. So they were all just lying there on the lawn, and my first thought really was that is exactly what Jonestown looked like. And the parallel was so perfect in my mind that that’s where I started from.

Your books have so many indelible images that are shocking. When you’re writing, do you tend to think of the characters first, or the concept, or do you have visual flashes?

Why do you think your work lends itself to having such a loyal fan base?

Boy, that’s a big question with a lot of speculation. It might be that that my books tend to go to the scariest, darkest places that most other kind of mass-tested material does not. Everything on Netflix has to reach such a huge audience. But my books are gonna give people a darker journey than something that’s been test marketed in a million different screening rooms.

As someone whose books have been banned many times through the years, do you feel we’re in the middle of a moment where a loud minority are calling for more bannings, or rather we’re at a cultural downswing where this could be the new normal?

Since 9/11, people have not gone near transgressive material, publishers would not touch it. So this kind of voluntary ban or cultural ban started September 12th, 2001. So maybe we’re seeing the worst of it now, and maybe it’s actually getting better.

What do you like to read personally? Do you tend to be on the more transgressive side or do you totally zag and have comfort food?

In this case I wanted to read a bunch of cozy mysteries, those sort of English mysteries where somebody is butchered and a cat solves the crime, or Miss Marple solves the crimes. I read a bunch and then I wanted to adopt all the tropes and use them for something very, very dark. But normally I just read short story collections because it gives me such a little taste of so many different writers and I’m not committed for 800 pages.

Were there any parts in the “Fight Club” movie adaptation that you didn’t understand at first, or that surprised you?

I wasn’t a big fan of the ticking bomb, that counting down clock near the end. And [screenwriter] Jim Uhls stuck it in because there’s obviously such a trope, and I’ve grown to accept that it is a trope.

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Fight Club: A Novel Paperback – May 1, 2018

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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.

Book 1 of 1 Fight Club Series
Print length 224 pages
Language English
Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date May 1, 2018
Dimensions 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
ISBN-10 0393355942
ISBN-13 978-0393355949
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (May 1, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393355942
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393355949
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.2 inches
#8 in Self-Help & Psychology Humor
#82 in Fiction Satire
#160 in Psychological Fiction (Books)

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Fight Club book review: this book changed me!

About the author

Chuck palahniuk.

Chuck Palahniuk's nine novels are the bestselling Snuff, Rant, Haunted, Lullaby and Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke, which was made into a film by director Clark Gregg. He is also the author of the non-fiction profile of Portland Fugitives and Refugees and the non-fiction collection Stranger Than Fiction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

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Fight Club – Movie or Book, Which is better?

In blog , Books , Reviews by Michael Michelini Last Updated: 07/26/2020 Leave a Comment

So I Have Watched The Movie 10+ Times – Still Enjoyed the book

It is true, the book is always better than the movie. Watching this movie in 1999 in New York City Theaters and I remember how much influence on my way of thinking, to challenge the hamster wheel, just as I was starting college.

Of course the book is way cooler after you watched the movie, as you have Brad Pitt in your head and the other amazing characters from the movie – honestly I am not sure how much I would have enjoyed the book if I didn’t already have the amazing visual experience from watching the video.

Movie or Book?

Buy The Fight Club Book now (better than the movie!

Yet by reading the book, you get so much more depth and feeling. Those quick 5 second clips in the movie now are written out in pages and you get the more granular feel of what is happening in Tyler and the character’s head (whose name we never know!).

The ending is different in the movie and the book – and I saw that in the review when deciding to invest in reading the book or not – and that alone is worth going through it.

What was surprising was how close the book and the movie are! Some of the exact lines are right from the book, and for the most part it is fairly straight along the the same storyline.

As Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time, I of course will enjoy the book and it gives a new angle and dimension – I should probably watch the movie (yes again) to more fully compare the book and movie.

What Do You Prefer? Fight Club Movie or Book?

For all those other Fight Club addicts (or should I say space monkeys?) – which did you prefer, the book or movie? Let us know in the comments below.

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Chuck Palahniuk outlines Fight Club comic book sequel: 'Tyler's maybe been around for centuries'

18 years after Fight Club became a pop-cultural sensation, its author Chuck Palahniuk is writing a sequel as a graphic novel – and has given hints as to its focus in a new interview with USA Today .

The book will be set ten years after the events of the first book, with its unnamed protagonist married to Marla Singer and father to a nine-year-old son. Fight Club, says Palahniuk, was "such a tirade against fathers — everything I had thought my father had not done combined with everything my peers were griping about their fathers. Now to find myself at the age that my father was when I was trashing him made me want to revisit it from the father's perspective and see if things were any better and why it repeats like that."

Where Fight Club was freighted with the professional, social and sexual anxieties of late youth, the sequel is more of a reflection on middle age's own frustrations. Palahniuk calls it an age "where you've made it to a certain extent; you're still not really happy but for different reasons. Also the idea that if you suppress that wild, creative part of you — that Tyler part of you — do you lose the best part of you? Sure, your life is more stable and safe, but is it a better life?"

Fight Club comic book sequel Chuck Palahniuk

In the first book, the protagonist is plagued and invigorated by an alter ego called Tyler Durden, whose past Palahniuk will also delve into during the sequel. "Tyler is something that maybe has been around for centuries and is not just this aberration that's popped into his mind," he said. The Project Mayhem terrorist group that the protagonist helps unleash in the first book is also apparently still around.

The book's artist, Cameron Stewart, has said he's using a "cartoony" style, "more appropriate for the density of the story and for some of its more absurdly comical moments."

Palahniuk said that he jumped the gun in announcing the sequel at Comic-Con last year: "I messed up and said I was doing the sequel in front of 1,500 geeks with telephones. Suddenly, there was this big scramble to honour my word." He's returning to Comic-Con this week for a panel with David Fincher, who directed the cult film adaptation of the novel with Edward Norton and Brad Pitt.

The 10-comic series will be published in May 2015, while Palahniuk's next novel, Beautiful You, is published in October this year.

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Chuck Palahniuk
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"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since " Death Wish ," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.

Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy locker-room fights. Women, who have had a lifetime of practice at dealing with little-boy posturing, will instinctively see through it; men may get off on the testosterone rush. The fact that it is very well made and has a great first act certainly clouds the issue.

Edward Norton stars as a depressed urban loner filled up to here with angst. He describes his world in dialogue of sardonic social satire. His life and job are driving him crazy. As a means of dealing with his pain, he seeks out 12-step meetings, where he can hug those less fortunate than himself and find catharsis in their suffering. It is not without irony that the first meeting he attends is for post-surgical victims of testicular cancer, since the whole movie is about guys afraid of losing their cojones.

These early scenes have a nice sly tone; they're narrated by the Norton character in the kind of voice Nathanael West used in Miss Lonelyhearts. He's known only as the Narrator, for reasons later made clear. The meetings are working as a sedative, and his life is marginally manageable when tragedy strikes: He begins to notice Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) at meetings. She's a "tourist" like himself--someone not addicted to anything but meetings. She spoils it for him. He knows he's a faker, but wants to believe everyone else's pain is real.

On an airplane, he has another key encounter, with Tyler Durden ( Brad Pitt ), a man whose manner cuts through the fog. He seems able to see right into the Narrator's soul, and shortly after, when the Narrator's high-rise apartment turns into a fireball, he turns to Tyler for shelter. He gets more than that. He gets in on the ground floor of Fight Club, a secret society of men who meet in order to find freedom and self-realization through beating one another into pulp.

It's at about this point that the movie stops being smart and savage and witty, and turns to some of the most brutal, unremitting, nonstop violence ever filmed. Although sensible people know that if you hit someone with an ungloved hand hard enough, you're going to end up with broken bones, the guys in "Fight Club" have fists of steel, and hammer one another while the sound effects guys beat the hell out of Naugahyde sofas with Ping-Pong paddles. Later, the movie takes still another turn. A lot of recent films seem unsatisfied unless they can add final scenes that redefine the reality of everything that has gone before; call it the Keyser Soze syndrome.

What is all this about? According to Durden, it is about freeing yourself from the shackles of modern life, which imprisons and emasculates men. By being willing to give and receive pain and risk death, Fight Club members find freedom. Movies like " Crash " (1997), must play like cartoons for Durden. He's a shadowy, charismatic figure, able to inspire a legion of men in big cities to descend into the secret cellars of a Fight Club and beat one another up.

Only gradually are the final outlines of his master plan revealed. Is Tyler Durden in fact a leader of men with a useful philosophy? "It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything," he says, sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He's a bully--Werner Erhard plus S & M, a leather club operator without the decor. None of the Fight Club members grows stronger or freer because of their membership; they're reduced to pathetic cultists. Issue them black shirts and sign them up as skinheads. Whether Durden represents hidden aspects of the male psyche is a question the movie uses as a loophole--but is not able to escape through, because "Fight Club" is not about its ending but about its action.

Of course, "Fight Club" itself does not advocate Durden's philosophy. It is a warning against it, I guess; one critic I like says it makes "a telling point about the bestial nature of man and what can happen when the numbing effects of day-to-day drudgery cause people to go a little crazy." I think it's the numbing effects of movies like this that cause people go to a little crazy. Although sophisticates will be able to rationalize the movie as an argument against the behavior it shows, my guess is that audience will like the behavior but not the argument. Certainly they'll buy tickets because they can see Pitt and Norton pounding on each other; a lot more people will leave this movie and get in fights than will leave it discussing Tyler Durden's moral philosophy. The images in movies like this argue for themselves, and it takes a lot of narration (or Narration) to argue against them.

Lord knows the actors work hard enough. Norton and Pitt go through almost as much physical suffering in this movie as Demi Moore endured in " G.I. Jane ," and Helena Bonham Carter creates a feisty chain-smoking hellcat who is probably so angry because none of the guys thinks having sex with her is as much fun as a broken nose. When you see good actors in a project like this, you wonder if they signed up as an alternative to canyoneering.

The movie was directed by David Fincher and written by Jim Uhls , who adapted the novel by Chuck Palahniuk . In many ways, it's like Fincher's movie " The Game " (1997), with the violence cranked up for teenage boys of all ages. That film was also about a testing process in which a man drowning in capitalism ( Michael Douglas ) has the rug of his life pulled out from under him and has to learn to fight for survival. I admired "The Game" much more than "Fight Club" because it was really about its theme, while the message in "Fight Club" is like bleeding scraps of Socially Redeeming Content thrown to the howling mob.

Fincher is a good director (his work includes "Alien 3," one of the best-looking bad movies I have ever seen, and " Seven ," the grisly and intelligent thriller). With "Fight Club" he seems to be setting himself some kind of a test--how far over the top can he go? The movie is visceral and hard-edged, with levels of irony and commentary above and below the action. If it had all continued in the vein explored in the first act, it might have become a great film. But the second act is pandering and the third is trickery, and whatever Fincher thinks the message is, that's not what most audience members will get. "Fight Club" is a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy--the kind of ride where some people puke and others can't wait to get on again.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Fight Club (1999)

Rated R For Extreme Violence, Sex

139 minutes

Meat Loaf Aday as Robert Paulsen

Edward Norton as Narrator

Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden

Jared Leto as Angel Face

Helena Bonham-Carter as Marla Singer

Based On The Novel by

Chuck Palahniuk

Directed by

David Fincher

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The Times’s former chief book critic, and author of “The Death of Truth,” doesn’t think in terms of genre: “J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are no more Y.A. reading, to me, than John le Carré’s Smiley novels are spy stories.”

What books are on your nightstand?

Too many books for the nightstand, I’m afraid — more like two (sometimes three) tottering piles on the floor, including these: “Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics,” by Stephen Greenblatt; “Small Country,” by Gaël Faye ; “Flash: The Making of Weegee the Famous,” by Christopher Bonanos; “There There,” by Tommy Orange; “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” by Jaron Lanier; “Going Into Town: A Love Letter to New York,” by Roz Chast; “OK, Mr. Field,” by Katharine Kilalea; “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” by Jon Meacham; “Hero of the Empire: The Boer War, a Daring Escape, and the Making of Winston Churchill,” by Candice Millard; “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo,” by Zora Neale Hurston ; and “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets,” by Svetlana Alexievich.

Does your appreciation of a book correlate with your interest in reviewing it? Is it easier to review books you admire or ones you think deserve criticism?

One of my favorite things, as a critic, was finding books by new writers who possessed a distinctive voice and vision, an inventive gift for storytelling. I also loved immersing myself in works of nonfiction that taught me something about the world, that made the past come alive or shed light on hidden corners of history or the news. I’d much rather share my enthusiasm for works I admired, than dissect the reasons I had problems with a book — or sift politicians’ accounts about, say, the Iraq war, for lies, omissions and spin. I felt a responsibility as a journalist to review such books, and situate them in context; but like most readers, I always looked forward to being captivated by a book. I wanted to be surprised, inspired, awed.

Which books were most instrumental to you in writing your new book?

In “The Death of Truth,” I wanted to look at how we got to where we are today — with reason, science and the rule of law under assault from a president who lies shamelessly and reflexively, and at least a third of the country willing to dwell in a world of “alternative facts.” In examining the fallout that dishonesty and the denial of objective truth are having on our democracy, I went back to the writings of thinkers like Hannah Arendt (“The Origins of Totalitarianism”) and George Orwell (“ 1984 ,” “A Collection of Essays”) who chronicled how cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to propaganda, and the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power.

The words of America’s founders are also uncannily prescient: Washington’s Farewell Address , for instance, warns of the dangers of demagoguery, extreme partisanship and the loss of shared ideals, while “The Federalist Papers” (authored by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay) provides an impassioned and fiercely rational defense of the Constitution and the essential role that the separation of powers plays in protecting our liberty.

In my book, I hope to remind readers of classics (like Alexis de Tocqueville’s “ Democracy in America ,” Richard Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and Daniel J. Boorstin’s “The Image”) that shed light on some of the larger social and political dynamics at work in the age of Trump, as well as some lesser known works by writers like Victor Klemperer and Stefan Zweig that provide some historical perspective on how autocracy, nationalism and the hatred of outsiders can swiftly take root in a democracy.

Are you a rereader? What kinds of books do you find yourself returning to time and time again?

Besides books I’ve reread for work or research, I often find myself returning to books because of prompts from news events (“ The Power Broker ,” by Robert Caro; “Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image,” by David Greenberg), the release of a new movie (Bradbury’s “ Fahrenheit 451 ,” Plath’s “The Bell Jar”) or by happening across a new edition of an old favorite in a bookstore.

How has your reading changed, if it has, since the election? What does your reading life look like now that you are no longer reviewing four to five books a month?

I’ve always been a news junkie, and an avid reader of newspapers and magazines, and this interest only ramped up during the campaign of 2016, and in the aftermath of the election. Several times a day, I would click between an assortment of news sites on the web and scroll through Twitter for breaking news as though it were an old wire service Teletype machine.

Because I began working on my book last fall, I also started reading and rereading titles that addressed some of the broader attitudes undermining truth today, including the growing partisanship in our politics, the merging of news and entertainment, the enshrinement of subjectivity, the populist suspicion of expertise and the spread of misinformation over social media.

The review schedule at The Times meant that I was often hopping between fiction and nonfiction, and from one subject to the next. While this meant that I made the happy acquaintance of lots of books I might not have otherwise read, it also meant that it was impossible to ever binge read a favorite author, or to indulge in the sort of in-depth, stream-of-consciousness reading that might take one, say, from Christopher Clark’s “ The Sleepwalkers ” to Barbara Tuchman ’s “The Guns of August” to Paul Fussell’s “The Great War and Modern Memory.”

Not reviewing all the time has also meant that I can at least sometimes turn off the analytic part of my brain — which makes mental notes about things like narrative structure, language and tone — and recover the innocence of reading for the sheer pleasure of it.

As a critic you had a good overview of literary styles and trends over the years. What strikes you now as the most significant, and why?

One development I noticed that accelerated in the last two decades or so was the outpouring of stellar work about the immigrant experience, often by writers who were themselves immigrants or second-generation Americans — including Marlon James, Edwidge Danticat, Gary Shteyngart, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Junot Díaz, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dinaw Mengestu, Ocean Vuong, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Tea Obreht, Colum McCann and Yaa Gyasi.

Such writers are part of a long tradition of outsiders (from Nabokov to Henry Roth to Chang-rae Lee), whose stereoscopic view of the world makes them keen observers of America. At the same time, their work reminds us what an essential role immigrants have played in America and in the forging of the American dream.

Which genres are you drawn to and which do you avoid?

I’m pretty omnivorous — in fact, I don’t think of books in terms of genres. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books are no more Y.A. reading, to me, than John le Carré ’s Smiley novels are spy stories.

That said, I enjoy thrillers, science fiction, graphic novels, dystopian fiction, cyberpunk, sports books (especially anything by Roger Angell).

The one genre I’m not really into: self-help books.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Who were your favorite books or authors? Heroes or heroines?

When I was a child, reading was a refuge and a magical form of transport to other worlds. When my parents got a new refrigerator, my father cut a door and windows in the box it came in, creating a playhouse for me — or, rather, a private reading room, where I could hide out with a stack of books and a flashlight.

I read anything and everything, but especially loved “A Wrinkle in Time,” the Oz books, Winnie-the-Pooh, “Horton Hears a Who!,” the Landmark series of biographies, Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology,” Paul de Kruif’s “Microbe Hunters,” the Marguerite Henry-Wesley Dennis horse books (“Misty of Chincoteague,” “Brighty of the Grand Canyon”) and animal stories like Sterling North’s “Rascal,” Joy Adamson’s “Born Free” and Gavin Maxwell’s “Ring of Bright Water.” I also spent hours looking things up in the World Book Encyclopedia.

Favorite heroines and heroes: Meg Murry in “A Wrinkle in Time,” Scout in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Max in “Where the Wild Things Are,” Lucy in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings” and Nancy Drew.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

“Richard III” (Shakespeare).

What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

Keith Richards on the blues, R&B, and country musicians he’s spent a lifetime studying — including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Hank Williams. In his electrifying memoir “Life,” Richards was eloquent about these artists’ singular achievement and their formative influence on rock n’ roll, and a collection of short portraits/appreciations could pass on more of his knowledge to a new generation of music lovers.

What book do you most like giving as a gift?

No one single book, but these are some of the books I’ve given multiple copies of to friends over the years: “Dispatches,” by Michael Herr; “Sleepless Nights,” by Elizabeth Hardwick; “The Shock of the New,” by Robert Hughes; “Out of Egypt,” by Andre Aciman; “ A Brief History of Seven Killings ,” by Marlon James; “The Emperor’s Last Island,” by Julia Blackburn; “White Noise,” by Don DeLillo; “City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s,” by Otto Friedrich; “Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire’s History of the Sixties,” edited by Harold Hayes.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, are invited?

Dead: Alexander Hamilton, Anton Chekhov, Wendy Wasserstein. Alive: Pope Francis, Judd Apatow, Mary Beard.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I’m hoping English department curriculums have changed since I was in college. I couldn’t make it through Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene” or Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa.”

What do you plan to read next?

Two timely books: “The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea,” by Bandi , and “ Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup ,” by John Carreyrou.

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Fight Club: A Novel
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COMMENTS

Fight Club
The next story, ''All the Nights of the World,'' introduces one of Cavell's key themes -- the relationship between a sporty young man, a taciturn athlete father and a girlfriend who tries to ...
Fight Club
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. THE DEVIL AND SONNY LISTON By Nick Tosches. Illustrated. 266 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $24.95. FROM its ...
FIGHT CLUB
Though he lands in heaven, which closely resembles a psycho ward, the narrator/Durden lives on in his flourishing clubs. This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds where so many self-described transgressive novels do not: It's dangerous because it's so compelling. 4. Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996. ISBN: -393-03976-5.
Chuck Palahniuk on 'Fight Club,' 'Not Forever, But For ...
When Fight Club was published in 1996, Palahniuk emerged as part of a generation of young, transgressive writers—including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis, A.M. Homes ...
The Men Who Still Love "Fight Club"
November 4, 2019. David Fincher's "Fight Club," from 1999, has become a focal point for the exploration of postmodern masculinity, white-male resentment, consumerism, and gender ...
Why 'Fight Club' Is About Transformation
The men who join Fight Club seek to eradicate everything superficially male about their lives — albeit through hypermasculine tactics — and the person you see in Fight Club, the narrator states, "is not who they are in the real world.". Fight Club does two things very well. It captures the colicky malaise of men, and it pursues a truth ...
Read the very first reviews of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club
By Dan Sheehan. August 17, 2023, 11:30am. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's era-defining debut novel about a load of disaffected men beating the bejesus out of each other in order to feel alive, was first published twenty-seven years ago today. The book rapidly gained a cult following, was adapted into one of the most iconic movies of the 1990s ...
Fight Club at Ten: A Love Story
"People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture," "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk told Dennis Lim recently in the New York Times:. Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they "really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die ...
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The adaptation of Fight Club was a flop at the box office, but achieved cult status on DVD. The film's popularity drove sales of the novel. Chuck put out two novels in 1999, Survivor and Invisible Monsters. Choke, published in 2001, became Chuck's first New York Times bestseller.
Fight Club review
The mood of Fight Club is in one way a zeitgeist-time-capsule for the drifting, self-questioning late 90s, a self-indulgent reverie with hints of JG Ballard, Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis.
Fight Club (novel)
Fight Club is a 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk.It was Palahniuk's first published novel, and follows the experiences of an unnamed protagonist struggling with insomnia.The protagonist finds relief by impersonating a seriously ill person in several support groups, after his doctor remarks that insomnia is not "real suffering" and that he should find out what it is really like to suffer.
Book review: 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk
However, there are bits of writing within Fight Club which absolutely sparkle - from the narrator identifying singular parts of the body to identify with multiple times over the course of the book, out of a stack of newspapers, "I am Joe's raging bile duct", to Marla's unapologetic darkness, "I want to have your abortion", to shreds of wisdom, "It's your life and it's ...
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club Movie Had One Thing Wrong With It
Chuck Palahniuk on His New Serial Killer Novel and the One Part He Didn't Like in the 'Fight Club' Movie. By William Earl. Adam Levy. Chuck Palahniuk 's just-released 20th novel, " Not ...
Fight Club: A Novel: Palahniuk, Chuck: 9780393355949: Amazon.com: Books
"An astonishing debut… Fight Club is a dark, unsettling, and nerve-chafing satire." ― Seattle Times "A volatile, brilliantly creepy satire." ― Washington Post "A powerful, dark, original novel. This is a memorable debut by an important writer." ― Robert Stone " Fight Club is hot. It's great. Even I can't write this well." ― Thom Jones "This brilliant bit of nihilism succeeds ...
Fight Club
Fight Club 1996. large image. Fight Club is a text which attempts to depict issues of masculine identity in a capitalist consumer society where the class/wealth hierarchy is extremely divided and unequal. The narrator, unnamed in the novel, experiences a 'rebirth' in masculinity caused by the manifestation of Tyler Durden, a personality that ...
Chuck Palahniuk
Radiohead has contributed a song to a movie based on "Choke," a novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Compiled by Julie Bloom. Page 1 of 3. 1. 2. 3. News about Chuck Palahniuk, including commentary and ...
Fight Club
Buy The Fight Club Book now (better than the movie! Yet by reading the book, you get so much more depth and feeling. Those quick 5 second clips in the movie now are written out in pages and you get the more granular feel of what is happening in Tyler and the character's head (whose name we never know!). The ending is different in the movie ...
Chuck Palahniuk outlines Fight Club comic book sequel: 'Tyler's maybe
18 years after Fight Club became a pop-cultural sensation, its author Chuck Palahniuk is writing a sequel as a graphic novel - and has given hints as to its focus in a new interview with USA Today.
Fight Club movie review & film summary (1999)
"Fight Club" is the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since "Death Wish," a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.Sometimes, for variety, they beat up themselves. It's macho porn -- the sex movie Hollywood has been moving toward for years, in which eroticism between the sexes is replaced by all-guy ...
Michiko Kakutani: By the Book
The Times's former chief book critic Michiko Kakutani, author of "The Death of Truth," doesn't think in terms of genre: "J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are no more Y.A. reading, to ...