Synopses & Reviews
With more than 300,000 copies sold, Chuck Palahniuk's brilliant first novel and cult classic is being reissued with a new Introduction by the author.
An underground classic since its first publication in 1996, Fight Club is widely recognized as one of the most original and provocative novels of the last decade. Now the author adds his own voice to the critical debate he generated. In a new Introduction, he discusses the various interpretations in the popular media of Fight Club and the movie it inspired, as well as his personal reactions to the work's reception and the influence that the Fight Club phenomenon has already had on our culture.
Chuck Palahniuk's darkly funny first novel tells the story of a disenfranchised young man frustrated with his bureacratic job and superficial relationships and disillusioned with the consumer culture's prepackaged pleasures. Relief for him and his peers comes in the form of Tyler Durden, the intensely charismatic inventor of Fight Club. Waiters, clerks, and middlemen seek out the visceral satisfaction of secret after-hours boxing matches in the basements of bars, thinking they have found a way to live beyond their confining and stultifying lives. But in Tyler's world there are no rules, no limits, no brakes.
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"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." Booklist
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"An astonishing debut....Fight Club is a dark, unsettling, and nerve-chafing satire." Seattle Times
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"[A]n apocalyptic, post-grunge taste from the West Coast...a bizarre, ugly, and determinedly cranked-up novel, a novel, you must dislike while reading, but there is something else in the pulse the staccato, edges-exposed way it gets from line to line that makes you wonder if the author might not know a few secrets. Palahniuk can write." Sven Birkerts, Esquire
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"A powerful, dark, original novel...a memorable debut by an important new writer." Robert Stone
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"Maybe our generation has found its Don DeLillo." Bret Easton Ellis
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"Even I can't write this well." Thom Jones
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"Palahniuk's language is urgent and tense, touched with psychopathic brilliance, his images dead-on accurate....[He] is an author who makes full use of the alchemical powers of fiction to synthesize a universe that mirrors our own fiction as a way of illuminating the world without obliterating its complexity." L.A. Weekly
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"Palahniuk displays a Swiftian gift for satire, as well as a knack for crafting mesmerizing sentences that loom with stark, prickly prose and repetitive rhythms." San Francisco Examiner
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"Fight Club offers diabolically sharp and funny writing." The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Fight Club is his first novel.