New Releases by Chuck Palahniuk

"A harrowing, perverse, laugh-aloud funny rocket ride of catastrophes…Gutsy, terse and cunning, Invisible Monsters may emerge as Palahniuk’s strongest book." —Greg Berkman, Seattle Times She’s a fashion model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden freeway "accident" leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful center of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists. Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from becoming a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better. And that salvation hides in the last places you’ll ever want to look.

A gang of adolescent terrorists, a spelling bee, and a terrible plan masquerading as a science project: This is Operation Havoc. Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of this indoctrinated little killer in a cunning double-edged satire of American xenophobia.

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.

Mais qui est donc Buster Casey, alias Rant ? Dans un futur où une partie de la population est " diurne " et l''autre " nocturne " selon un couvre-feu très strict, Peste prend la forme d''une biographie orale faite de rapports contradictoires émanant de témoins qui ont connu le mystérieux Buster de près ou de loin. Garçon aux moeurs étranges, friand de morsures animales en tous genres pour certains, génial tueur en série ou répugnant individu pour d''autres, le véritable Buster Casey semble, au fil des récits, de plus en plus insaisissable et protéiforme. De quoi alimenter le mythe... Évangile subversif et grotesque où le rire donne la réplique à l''horreur, Peste décrit un monde qui marche sur la tête, où la vie est à mourir d''ennui et la mort positive et créatrice. Chuck Palahniuk explore, encore et toujours, les tréfonds de la vie moderne et dresse le portrait en creux d''une Amérique en mal de repères.

Want to know where Chuck Palahniuk’s tonsils currently reside? Been looking for a naked mannequin to hide in your kitchen cabinets? Curious about Chuck’s debut in an MTV music video? What goes on at the Scum Center? How do you get to the Apocalypse Café? In the closest thing he may ever write to an autobiography, Chuck Palahniuk provides answers to all these questions and more as he takes you through the streets, sewers, and local haunts of Portland, Oregon. According to Katherine Dunn, author of the cult classic Geek Love, Portland is the home of America’s “fugitives and refugees.” Get to know these folks, the “most cracked of the crackpots,” as Palahniuk calls them, and come along with him on an adventure through the parts of Portland you might not otherwise believe actually exist. No other travel guide will give you this kind of access to “a little history, a little legend, and a lot of friendly, sincere, fascinating people who maybe should’ve kept their mouths shut.” Here are strange personal museums, weird annual events, and ghost stories. Tour the tunnels under downtown Portland. Visit swingers’ sex clubs, gay and straight. See Frances Gabe’s famous 1940s Self-Cleaning House. Look into strange local customs like the I-Tit-a-Rod Race and the Santa Rampage. Learn how to talk like a local in a quick vocabulary lesson. Get to know, I mean really get to know, the animals at the Portland zoo. Oh, the list goes on and on.

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.

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.

Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. In his first collection of nonfiction, Chuck Palahniuk brings us into this world, and gives us a glimpse of what inspires his fiction.At the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival in Missoula, Montana, average people perform public sex acts on an outdoor stage. In a mansion once occupied by The Rolling Stones, Marilyn Manson reads his own Tarot cards and talks sweetly to his beautiful actress girlfriend. Across the country, men build their own full-size castles and rocketships that will send them into space. Palahniuk himself experiments with steroids, works on an assembly line by day and as a hospice volunteer by night, and experiences the brutal murder of his father by a white supremacist. With this new direction, Chuck Palahniuk has proven he can do anything.

Misty Wilmot est une femme frustrée : coincée sur une île défigurée par l''invasion touristique, elle travaille comme une esclave dans le grand hôtel du coin pour faire vivre sa famille. Son mari, Peter, un architecte qu''elle a rencontré des années plus tôt dans une école d''art, a tenté de se suicider et se retrouve dans le coma. Plus rien ne tourne rond dans la vie de Misty : pourquoi Peter, avant de vouloir en finir, s''est-il amusé à sceller certaines pièces des villas touristiques sur lesquelles il travaillait ? Comment expliquer les messages haineux qu''il a bombés sur les murs, annonçant la vengeance des habitants de l''île contre les envahisseurs extérieurs ? Pourquoi les autochtones se mettent-ils à la regarder bizarrement ? Misty décide de mettre ses peurs noir sur blanc et d''écrire un journal intime. Mais attention, la folie guette... Au fil du temps et de ses livres, les interrogations de Palahniuk se font plus complexes, plus intimes et plus profondes : ses récits deviennent de plus en plus inclassables ; ils louchent vers le fantastique, l''irréel et le paranormal. Mélange de Jung, Borges, Levine - l''auteur de Rosemary''s Baby - passé à la centrifugeuse Palahniuk, ce Journal intime est un cocktail détonant.

Misty Wilmot has had it. Once a promising young artist, she’s now stuck on an island ruined by tourism, drinking too much and working as a waitress in a hotel. Her husband, a contractor, is in a coma after a suicide attempt, but that doesn’t stop his clients from threatening Misty with lawsuits over a series of vile messages they’ve found on the walls of houses he remodeled. Suddenly, though, Misty finds her artistic talent returning as she begins a period of compulsive painting. Inspired but confused by this burst of creativity, she soon finds herself a pawn in a larger conspiracy that threatens to cost hundreds of lives. What unfolds is a dark, hilarious story from America’s most inventive nihilist, and Palahniuk’s most impressive work to date.

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.

La vie de Shannon ressemble à un conte de fées pour adolescentes : mannequin jeune et jolie, elle se partage entre son petit copain et Evie, sa meilleure amie, mannequin comme elle. Un jour, au volant de sa voiture, une balle perdue lui brise la mâchoire inférieure. A jamais défigurée, tellement laide que son entourage fait semblant de ne pas la voir, Shannon est projetée dans un monde invisible dont elle devient un monstre emblématique. C''est à l''hôpital que Shannon va trouver son salut en la personne de Brandy Alexander, transsexuel excentrique près de l''opération définitive. Grâce à elle, Shannon va apprendre à se réinventer une autre vie dans cette société américaine où tout n''est qu''apparence. Lors d''une course-poursuite rocambolesque qui la conduit à travers les Etats-Unis et le Canada, Shannon, rompant le cercle des apparences, connaîtra enfin la vérité. Roman déroutant d''une noirceur assumée, Monstres invisibles surprend par sa forme élaborée et par le désespoir de son propos. Qui sont ces Monstres invisibles si ce n''est cette partie secrète de nous-mêmes qui triche sans cesse avec la réalité pour mieux coller aux apparences ? La lecture de Monstres invisibles laisse une sensation de malaise et de gêne. Le monde est-il vraiment comme l''auteur nous le décrit ? Palahniuk ne répond pas à cette question et laisse à chacun le soin de se forger une opinion.

Tender Branson, dernier survivant du Creedish Death Cult (une secte adepte d''un culte de la mort) dicte l''histoire de sa vie sur la boîte noire du vol 2039, naviguant sous pilote automatique à plus de 13 000 mètres d''altitude. Il est seul et l''avion va s''écraser dans le désert australien. Mais avant, Branson va dérouler le fil du voyage qui l''a conduit d''une jeunesse Creedish soumise aux diktats de la secte à son rôle actuel de Messie ultramédiatique gonflé aux stéroïdes et au collagène. Il va aussi révéler la vérité sur son histoire d''amour tordue avec l''insaisissable prophétesse Fertilité Hollis, affirmer sa conviction que "la seule différence entre le suicide et le martyre réside dans la couverture de presse", expliquer comment il a écrit ses best-sellers dont Le livre des Prières Très Communes (la prière pour retarder l''orgasme, celle pour empêcher la chute des cheveux ou faire taire les alarmes de voitures, entre autres) et revendiquer la responsabilité du Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, un dépôt d''ordures à ciel ouvert pour tous les ouvrages, gadgets et instruments pornographiques passés de mode. Imprévisible et inoubliable, Survivant est un sommet d''humour sauvage et glacial qui confirme que Chuck Palahniuk est bien l''un des écrivains de fiction les plus originaux du moment.