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Chuck Palahniuk

Biography

Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk’s novels include the bestselling SNUFF; RANT; HAUNTED; LULLABY; 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 nonfiction profile of Portland, FUGITIVES AND REFUGEES, and the nonfiction collection STRANGER THAN FICTION. His story collection MAKE SOMETHING UP was a widely banned bestseller. His graphic novel FIGHT CLUB II hit #1 on the New York Times list. He’s also the author of FIGHT CLUB III and the coloring books BAIT and LEGACY, as well as the writing guide CONSIDER THIS. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Chuck Palahniuk

Books by Chuck Palahniuk

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction, Satire

The best and brightest students at a seemingly reputable high school are disappearing. Every day it seems another overachiever is lost to an apparent suicide. But something far more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. These kids have been under surveillance since birth, monitored and measured by an online service called “Greener Pastures.” It’s here that billionaires observe and recruit the next generation of talent. The highest test scores, the best grades and the most niche extracurriculars just might land these teenagers an enticing offer at auction. A couple billion dollars in exchange for the remainder of your life and intellectual labor sounds like a pretty fair deal. Doesn’t it? In SHOCK INDUCTION, students must choose between the risk of following their dreams or the security of money and a lifetime of servitude to the world’s wealthiest and most elite.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction, Horror, Satire

Meet Otto and Cecil. Two brothers growing up privileged in the Welsh countryside. They enjoy watching nature shows, playing with their pet pony, impersonating their Grandfather...and killing the help. Murder is the family business after all. “Downton Abbey,” this is not. However, it’s not so easy to continue the family legacy with the constant stream of threats and distractions seemingly leaping from the hedgerow. With Grandfather putting pressure on Otto to step up, it becomes clear that this will all end in only two ways: a nuclear apocalypse or just another day among the creeping thistle and tree peonies. And in a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk, either is equally possible.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction

Gates Foster lost his daughter, Lucy, 17 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 that give 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.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Memoir, Nonfiction

In CONSIDER THIS, 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.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction, Satire

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. When Adjustment Day arrives, it fearlessly makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction, Short Stories

Representing work that spans several years, MAKE SOMETHING UP is a compilation of 21 stories and one novella (some previously published, some not) that will disturb and delight. In "Zombies," the best and brightest of a high school prep school become tragically addicted to the latest drug craze: electric shocks from cardiac defibrillators. In "Knock, Knock," a son hopes to tell one last off-color joke to a father in his final moments, while in "Tunnel of Love," a massage therapist runs the curious practice of providing 'relief' to dying clients.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction, Sexuality

Mega billionaire C. Linus Maxwell whisks Penny off to a hotel suite in Paris, where he proceeds, notebook in hand, to bring her to previously undreamed-of heights of orgasmic pleasure for days on end. Penny discovers that she is a test subject for the final development of a line of sex toys. 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. Maxwell's plan for erotically enabled world domination must be stopped. 

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction

DOOMED follows Madison back to earth as a ghost, doomed to haunting her parents for a year.  In flashback we see her earlier childhood, including the death of the kitten whose dead body subsequently clogged the plumbing of the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel.  That death is not Madison's doing, but another death is.  Whether it's murder or self-defense, as a ten-year-old Madison kills someone horrifically, and that's the most-likely reason why she was damned in the first place.  We also begin to recognize a centuries-long conspiracy engineered to train and test Maddy for her role as the savior of all spiritual beings.

Nope, nothing subtle, here.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction

This is the afterlife as only Chuck Palahniuk could imagine it: a twisted inferno where The English Patient plays on endless repeat, roaming demons devour sinners limb by limb, and the damned interrupt your dinner from their sweltering call center to hard-sell you Hell.

by Chuck Palahniuk - Fiction

Detective Michael Bennett and his family, reeling from a crisis that would destroy lesser families, the Bennetts escape New York for a vacation. An idyllic country town in the Maine woods is haunted by an epidemic. When local cops uncover a grisly crime scene buried deep in the woods, they consult the vacationing Bennett. But no one will talk to the big-city detective, and the bodies keep piling up. A young, hardscrabble, and forgotten girl, homeless and destitute, she represents the closest thing Bennett has to a partner.