Understanding Chuck Palahniuk

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Understanding Chuck Palahniuk

Author : Douglas Keesey
Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN 13 : 1611176980
Total Pages : 139 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (111 download)

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Book Synopsis Understanding Chuck Palahniuk by : Douglas Keesey

Download or read book Understanding Chuck Palahniuk written by Douglas Keesey and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2016-09-30 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the fictions of the Fight Club author, who is both loved and loathed Ever since his first novel, Fight Club, was made into a cult film by David Fincher, Chuck Palahniuk has been a consistent presence on the New York Times best-seller list. A target of critics but a fan favorite, Palahniuk has been loathed and loved in equal measure for his dark humor, edgy topics, and confrontational writing style. In close readings of Fight Club and the thirteen novels that this controversial author has published since, Douglas Keesey argues that Palahniuk is much more than a "shock jock" engaged in mere sensationalism. His visceral depictions of sex and violence have social, psychological, and religious significance. Keesey takes issue with reviewers who accuse Palahniuk of being an angry nihilist and a misanthrope, showing instead that he is really a romantic at heart and a believer in community. In this first comprehensive introduction to Palahniuk's fiction, Keesey reveals how this writer's outrageous narratives are actually rooted in his own personal experiences, how his seemingly unprecedented works are part of the American literary tradition of protagonists in search of an identity, and how his negative energy is really social satire directed at specific ills that he diagnoses and wishes to cure. After tracing the influence of his working-class background, his journalistic education, and his training as a "minimalist" writer, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk exposes connections between the writer's novels by grouping them thematically: the struggle for identity (Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke); the horror trilogy (Lullaby, Diary, Haunted); teen terrors (Rant, Pygmy); porn bodies and romantic myths (Snuff, Tell-All, Beautiful You); and a decidedly unorthodox revision of Dante's Divine Comedy (Damned, Doomed). Drawing on numerous author interviews and written in an engaging and accessible style, Understanding Chuck Palahniuk should appeal to scholars, students, and fans alike.

Tell-All

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385533179
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Tell-All by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Tell-All written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-05-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hyperactive love child of Page Six and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? caught in a tawdry love triangle with The Fan. Even Kitty Kelly will blush. Soaked, nay, marinated in the world of vintage Hollywood, Tell-All is a Sunset Boulevard–inflected homage to Old Hollywood when Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ruled the roost; a veritable Tourette’s syndrome of rat-tat-tat name-dropping, from the A-list to the Z-list; and a merciless send-up of Lillian Hellman’s habit of butchering the truth that will have Mary McCarthy cheering from the beyond. Our Thelma Ritter–ish narrator is Hazie Coogan, who for decades has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine “Miss Kathie” Kenton—veteran of multiple marriages, career comebacks, and cosmetic surgeries. But danger arrives with gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III, who worms his way into Miss Kathie’s heart (and boudoir). Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written a celebrity tell-all memoir foretelling Miss Kathie’s death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman–penned musical extravaganza; as the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans—and for posterity. Tell-All is funny, subversive, and fascinatingly clever. It’s wild, it’s wicked, it’s bold-faced—it’s vintage Chuck.

Fight Club 3 (Graphic Novel)

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Dark Horse Comics
ISBN 13 : 1506711804
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (67 download)

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Book Synopsis Fight Club 3 (Graphic Novel) by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Fight Club 3 (Graphic Novel) written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new movement has replaced Project Mayhem, and even Tyler Durden doesn't know how to play by these rules. Marla Singer is about to deliver her second child, but the daddy isn't her husband--it's Tyler, who's very invested in his heir, and the world he'll inherit, as Die Off Industries plots to fine-tune mankind. Bestselling novelist Chuck Palahniuk is back with his greatest creation, the sequel to the book that spent six months on the 2016 New York Times bestseller list. Teaming once again with award-winning artists Cameron Stewart and David Mack, Palahniuk leads a full frontal assault of the culture, from online dating to weaponized STDs, as a strange picture frame opens a road to paradise. 2019's bestselling twelve-issue series is collected in one massive digital book. Get in touch with your ugly side. Collects Fight Club 3 issues #1-#12. "Whether you've been a fan since the '90s or were hooked by the jump to comics, you'll want to see what comes next in this highly unpredictable saga."- PASTE MAGAZINE "Fight Club 3 is everything that a sequel to a sequel should be. It elevates the dark themes of the novel and the first graphic novel to the next illogical, insanely violent step." - COMICON.COM "Palahniuk's work takes some of our greatest shortcomings--insufficient or inadequate parenting, toxic isolation-- then magnifies and underlines them in fractured skulls and drunken vomit." - PLAYBOY "Scabby and surreal." - DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD "The first rule of the comic book incarnation of Fight Club is that it'll look good." - HOLLYWOOD REPORTER "Ambitious." - ADVENTURES IN POOR TASTE "Trippy." - EVERYTHING ACTION "The talent and care that went into this issue is palpable, from David Mack's cover to Nate Piekos' lettering... This book does not allow you to get comfortable." - COMICWATCH "Stewart continues to do the Fight Club saga justice with his artwork...flies and all." - ROGUES PORTAL "Bold...Palahniuk doesn't give us what we want here but rather what we need. Namely a story that makes the reader think not just about what's going on but also about their own expectations of the archetypes portrayed in the story; the flies buzzing on the page hinting at a character's intent; the name drop of "snowflake" for a caller I.D.; a subtle tattoo on the neck. All raising enough questions to leave us staring at every panel with the steely focus of a seasoned detective combing a crime scene for clues." - BIG COMIC PAGE

Consider This

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1538717964
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (387 download)

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Book Synopsis Consider This by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Consider This written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Grand Central Publishing. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned, bestselling novelist Chuck Palahniuk takes us behind the scenes of the writing life, with postcards from decades on the road and incredible examination of the power of fiction and the art of storytelling. In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing. With advice grounded in years of careful study and a keenly observed life, Palahniuk combines practical advice and concrete examples from beloved classics, his own books, and a "kitchen-table MFA" culled from an evolving circle of beloved authors and artists, with anecdotes, postcards from the road, and much more. Clear-eyed, sensitive, illuminating, and knowledgeable, Consider This is Palahniuk's love letter to stories and storytellers, booksellers and books themselves. Consider it a classic in the making.

Adjustment Day: A Novel

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393652602
Total Pages : 250 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (936 download)

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Book Synopsis Adjustment Day: A Novel by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Adjustment Day: A Novel written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller "An irreverent satirical fantasy about a sudden and violent upheaval.…Think Tom Robbins channeling Jonathan Swift." —David Takami, Seattle Times Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of burying the elites. Adjustment Day’s arrival makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.

Rant

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor Canada
ISBN 13 : 0307371964
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Rant by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Rant written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-02-24 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The provocative and mind-bending new novel from the bestselling author of Fight Club and Haunted. Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins – and a childhood murderer? – Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton into the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where, on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for special markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey makes three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies . . . Expect hilarity and horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He’s the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what’s – uh-oh – coming next. Excerpt from RANT: Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities, after they croak their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies they never met in real life. Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. . . . The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive–or praising you after you ain’t.

Damned

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
ISBN 13 : 0385671113
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (856 download)

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Book Synopsis Damned by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Damned written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2011-10-18 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think adolescence is hell? You have no idea... Welcome to Dante's Inferno, by way of The Breakfast Club, from the mind of American fiction's most brilliant troublemaker. "Death, like life, is what you make out of it." So says Madison, the whip-tongued 11-year-old narrator of Damned, Chuck Palahniuk's subversive homage to the young adult genre. Madison is abandoned at her Swiss boarding school over Christmas while her parents are off touting their new film projects and adopting more orphans. Over the holidays she dies of a marijuana overdose--and the next thing she knows, she's in Hell. This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno inspired by both the most extreme and mundane of human evils, where The English Patient plays on repeat and roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb. However, underneath Madison's sad teenager affect there is still a child struggling to accept not only the events of her dysfunctional life, but also the truth about her death. For Madison, though, a more immediate source of comfort lies in the motley crew of young sinners she meets during her first days in Hell. With the help of Archer, Babette, Leonard, and Patterson, she learns to navigate Hell--and discovers that she'd rather be mortal and deluded and stupid with those she loves than perfect and alone.

Haunted

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385515839
Total Pages : 428 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Haunted by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Haunted written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2005-05-03 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Haunted is a novel made up of twenty-three horrifying, hilarious, and stomach-churning stories. They’re told by people who have answered an ad for a writer’s retreat and unwittingly joined a “Survivor”-like scenario where the host withholds heat, power, and food. As the storytellers grow more desperate, their tales become more extreme, and they ruthlessly plot to make themselves the hero of the reality show that will surely be made from their plight. This is one of the most disturbing and outrageous books you’ll ever read, one that could only come from the mind of Chuck Palahniuk.

Where Things Come Back

Author : John Corey Whaley
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1442413344
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (424 download)

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Book Synopsis Where Things Come Back by : John Corey Whaley

Download or read book Where Things Come Back written by John Corey Whaley and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventeen-year-old Cullen's summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin's death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother's sudden disappearance.

Fight Club: A Novel

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393066398
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (93 download)

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Book Synopsis Fight Club: A Novel by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Fight Club: A Novel written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Doomed

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385533152
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Doomed by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Doomed written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Madison Spencer, the liveliest and snarkiest dead girl in the universe, continues the afterlife adventure begun in Chuck Palahniuk’s bestseller Damned. Just as that novel brought us a brilliant Hell that only he could imagine, Doomed is a dark and twisted apocalyptic vision from this provocative storyteller. The bestselling Damned chronicled Madison’s journey across the unspeakable (and really gross) landscape of the afterlife to confront the Devil himself. But her story isn’t over yet. In a series of electronic dispatches from the Great Beyond, Doomed describes the ultimate showdown between Good and Evil. After a Halloween ritual gone awry, Madison finds herself trapped in Purgatory—or, as mortals like you and I know it, Earth. She can see and hear every detail of the world she left behind, yet she’s invisible to everyone who’s still alive. Not only do people look right through her, they walk right through her as well. The upside is that, no longer subject to physical limitations, she can pass through doors and walls. Her first stop is her parents’ luxurious apartment, where she encounters the ghost of her long-deceased grandmother. For Madison, the encounter triggers memories of the awful summer she spent upstate with Nana Minnie and her grandfather, Papadaddy. As she revisits the painful truth of what transpired over those months (including a disturbing and finally fatal meeting in a rest stop’s fetid men’s room, in which . . . well, never mind), her saga of eternal damnation takes on a new and sinister meaning. Satan has had Madison in his sights from the very beginning: through her and her narcissistic celebrity parents, he plans to engineer an era of eternal damnation. For everyone. Once again, our unconventional but plucky heroine must face her fears and gather her wits for the battle of a lifetime. Dante Alighieri, watch your back; Chuck Palahniuk is gaining on you.

Beautiful You

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385538049
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

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Book Synopsis Beautiful You by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Beautiful You written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A billion husbands are about to be replaced." From the author of Fight Club, the classic portrait of the damaged contemporary male psyche, now comes this novel about the apocalyptic marketing possibilities of a new product that gives new meaning to the term "self-help." Penny Harrigan is a low-level associate in a big Manhattan law firm with an apartment in Queens and no love life at all. So it comes as a great shock when she finds herself invited to dinner by one C. Linus Maxwell, a software mega-billionaire and lover of the most gorgeous and accomplished women on earth. After dining at Manhattan's most exclusive restaurant, he whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed-of heights of gratification for days on end. What's not to like? This: Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of feminine products to be marketed in a nationwide chain of boutiques called Beautiful You. So potent and effective are these devices that women by the millions line up outside the stores on opening day and then lock themselves in their room with them and stop coming out. Except for batteries. Maxwell's plan for battery-powered world domination must be stopped. But how?

Lullaby

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1400075572
Total Pages : 274 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Lullaby by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Lullaby written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2003-07-29 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the author of the New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times. "A harrowing and hilarious glimpse into the future of civilization.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.

Pygmy

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Doubleday Canada
ISBN 13 : 030737372X
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis Pygmy by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Pygmy written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Doubleday Canada. This book was released on 2009-09-30 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival midwestern American airport greater _____ area. Flight _____. Date _____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc.” Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the United States, disguised as exchange students, to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this thoroughly indoctrinated little killer, who hates Americans with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire of a xenophobia that might, in fact, be completely justified.

The Invention of Sound

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Hachette UK
ISBN 13 : 1538717999
Total Pages : 163 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (387 download)

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Book Synopsis The Invention of Sound by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book The Invention of Sound written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-09-08 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A father searching for his missing daughter is suddenly given hope when a major clue is discovered, but learning the truth could shatter the seemingly perfect image Hollywood is desperate to uphold. Gates Foster lost his daughter, Lucy, seventeen years ago. He's never stopped searching. Suddenly, a shocking new development provides Foster with his first major lead in over a decade, and he may finally be on the verge of discovering the awful truth. Meanwhile, Mitzi Ives has carved out a space among the Foley artists creating the immersive sounds giving Hollywood films their authenticity. Using the same secret techniques as her father before her, she's become an industry-leading expert in the sound of violence and horror, creating screams so bone-chilling, they may as well be real. Soon Foster and Ives find themselves on a collision course that threatens to expose the violence hidden beneath Hollywood's glamorous façade. A grim and disturbing reflection on the commodification of suffering and the dangerous power of art, The Invention of Sound is Chuck Palahniuk at the peak of his literary powers -- his most suspenseful, most daring, and most genre-defying work yet.

Choke

Author : Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 1400032709
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Choke by : Chuck Palahniuk

Download or read book Choke written by Chuck Palahniuk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2002-07-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be “saved” by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor’s life, go on to send checks to support him. When he’s not pulling this stunt, Victor cruises sexual addiction recovery workshops for action, visits his addled mom, and spends his days working at a colonial theme park. His creator, Chuck Palahniuk, is the visionary we need and the satirist we deserve.

Reading Chuck Palahniuk

Author : Cynthia Kuhn
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135254680
Total Pages : 246 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (352 download)

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Book Synopsis Reading Chuck Palahniuk by : Cynthia Kuhn

Download or read book Reading Chuck Palahniuk written by Cynthia Kuhn and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-10-11 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Chuck Palahniuk examines how the author pushes through a variety of boundaries to shape fiction and to question American identity in powerful and important ways. Palahniuk's innovative stylistic accomplishments and notoriously disturbing subject matters invite close analysis, and the new essays in this collection offer fascinating insights about Palahniuk's texts, contexts, contributions, and controversies. Addressing novels from Fight Club through Snuff, as well as his nonfiction, this volume will be valuable to anyone with a serious interest in contemporary literature.