Chuck Palahniuk, página 2 de 9

Reprenent l'humor negre i la força de Club de lluita, la seva primera novel·la ja convertida en una de les més importants del final del segle XX, Chuck Palahniuk construeix, a Rant, una pertorbadora novel·la que reprodueix la biografia oral de l'assassí en sèrie més eficient dels nostres temps, Buster Casey. Jove i rebel, nascut per viure ràpid, morir jove i matar el màxim de gent possible, Buster Casey és la llavor diabòlica d'aquesta esplèndida novel·la que reconstrueix, a partir de les anècdotes i testimonis de tots aquells que el van conèixer, la seva curta i violenta vida. Escrita amb l'originalitat, la tensió narrativa i el sentit de l'humor que caracteritzen totes les seves obres, Rant és un monument a la irreverència i la part grotesca de la vida, un homenatge al món marginal i a les persones que viuen al marge de l'establert.

Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. This wild, lethally funny novel unfolds from the perspectives of various men wh

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. À 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 États-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.

RANT takes the form of an oral history of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors and relations have their say on this (in Chuck Palahniuk's words) 'evil, gender-conflicted Forrest Gump character'. Buster Casey was every small kid born into a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. Anyone who's ever kissed him would do well to seek treatment, for his recreational drug of choice is rabies and he gets bitten by black widow spiders for the priapic effect of their venom. The high school rebel who wins, Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton for the big city, where he becomes a leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where on designated nights, the participants recognise each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails and 'Just Married' toothpaste graffiti. Or, with 'forgotten' coffee mugs bolted to their car roofs or Christmas trees tied from bumper to bumper. During specific windows of time, in limited areas of the city, Party Crashers look for the designated markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It's in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey meets 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. But it's a plague that liberates his peers from being stuck in only one boring track through history… Expect hilarity, horror and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He's the post-millennial Jonathan Swift, the man to watch to learn what's - uh-oh - coming next.

Victor Mancini has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's hospital care: pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who 'saves you' will feel responsible for you for the rest of their lives. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of cheques, week in, week out. Victor also works at a theme park with a motley group of losers, cruises sex addiction groups for action, and visits his mother, whose Alzheimer's disease now hides what may be the startling truth about his parentage.

Palahniuk depicts Midwestern life through the eyes of Pygmy, a thoroughly indoctrinated little killer who hates America with a passion, in this cunning double-edged satire.

Tell-All is many things: a Sunset Boulevard-inflected homage to Old Hollywood when grand dames like Bette Davis and Joan Crawford ruled the roost. A Douglas Sirk-inspired melodrama full of big gestures and muted psychic torment. A veritable Tourette's Syndrome of rat-tat-tat name-dropping, from the A-list to the Z-list. A merciless send-up of of Lillian Hellman's habit of butchering the truth that will have Mary McCarthy cheering from the beyond. Our narrator is Hazie Coogan, who for decades has tended to the outsized needs of Katherine 'Miss Kathie' Kenton, a star of the wattage of Elizabeth Taylor and the emotional torments of Judy Garland. The survivor of multiple marriages, career comebacks and cosmetic surgeries, Miss Kathie lives the way legends should. But danger lurks when gentleman caller Webster Carlton Westward III arrives and worms his way into Miss Kathie's heart and boudoir. Hazie discovers that this bounder has already written his celebrity tell-all memoir and that it foretells

A series of dispatches written in fractured and occasionally hilarious English suck readers into the mind of exchange student and would-be terrorist Pygmy.In this wildly experimental text, Palahniuk (Snuff, 2008, etc.) creates such a compelling character in Pygmy that we accept the boy's biases and epithets as completely appropriate. He arrives in the United States with a strong accent and a strong distaste for everything American, including his host family: vast cow father, pig dog brother, chicken mother, and cat sister. While planning his rather murky act of terrorism (Code Name: Operation Havoc), Pygmy begins to accommodate himself to American life, especially high school. Along with other social losers, he represents the United States in a model UN conference, unaccountably wins a spelling bee and takes part in a science fair during which the plants in a competing hydroponics garden are exposed as marijuana. (Sabotage successful, he writes.) Trying, like many of us, to make sense of contemporary American life, Pygmy fails because so much of popular culture is short on logic and meaning. His take on what the customs agent assures him is the greatest country on earth? Snake nest. American den of evil. Hive of corruption. His perception of the educational system? Primary function introduce partners for reproduction. His take on a girl at a school dance? Specimen female, permit perform mating dance prior generate human embryo? Pygmy loves to quote leaders he admires, such as Adolf Hitler: It is not truth that matters, but victory. And while his machinations eventually destroy his American family, not even the disclosure that Pygmy is a terrorist can get much of a rise out of his host sister, who has the typical adolescent reaction: Whatever.Stylistically exhilarating but not for every taste. (Kirkus Reviews)

Every weekend, in basements and parking lots across the country, young men with good white-collar jobs and absent fathers take off their shoes and shirts and fight each other barehanded for as long as they have to. Then they go back to those jobs with blackened eyes and loosened teeth and the sense that they can handle anything. Fight Club is the invention of Tyler Durden, projectionist, waiter and dark, anarchic genius. And it's only the beginning of his plans for revenge on a world where cancer support groups have the corner on human warmth.

Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. SNUFF unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Cassie Wright, sacerdotisa del porno, intenta coronar los éxitos de su legendaria carrera batiendo el récord mundial de fornicación en serie. Grabada por una cámara. Con seiscientos hombres. "Snuff" se fija en las perspectivas del Sr. 72, el Sr. 137, y del Sr. 600, que esperan su turno ante la cámara en una habitación verde muy concurrida. Esta novela salvaje, letalmente divertida fruto de una exhaustiva investigación, traduce por primera vez a ficción literaria la enorme pero subestimada presencia de la pornografía en la vida contemporánea.

Pygmy is a dark comedy about terrorism and racism. The lead character is a 13-year-old foreign exchange student sent to live with a suburban, white, middle-class family. Oh, and they're Christians. The visit is for six months, and he's one of a dozen similar kids, all shipped to America to live with typical families. The secret truth is that Pygmy is a terrorist, trained since infancy in martial arts, chemistry and radical hatred of the United States. He has six months to build a prize-winning project for the National Science Fair. If he succeeds, he and his project will go to Washington, D.C. for the finals competition -- where the project will explode, killing millions.

Misty's husband, a carpenter named Peter, is in a coma after a suicide attempt. She herself is an artist who doesn't make art; instead, she's a waitress at the hotel on the beautiful but touristy island where she lives with her preadolescent daughter. Then, oddly, she becomes ill--and starts to paint. And can't stop

"Fight Club" established Palahniuk as a brilliant satirist of deranged times. Victor Mancini, the protagonist of his new novel"Choke, " needs to pay for elder care for his mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's. An antihero for millennial America, Victor finds that his whole existence is a struggle to wrest an identity from overwhelming forces.

In this black comedy, a reporter investigating a sudden spike in the number of infant deaths discovers a link between each of the victims--apparently all had been read a particular poem from a mysterious book found at the scene of each death. His subsequent investigation leads him into contact with everyone from librarians to witches to eco-terrorists.

« Personne ne veut voir ses problèmes résolus. Ses drames, ses égarements, ses histoires réglées, sa vie débarrassée de ses merdes. Sinon, que resterait-il à tout un chacun ? Rien que l'inconnu, ce vaste inconnu qui fiche la trouille. » Tender Branson est bien placé pour le dire. Il est le dernier survivant d'une secte d'allumés et il navigue seul, après l'avoir détourné, dans un Boing 747 mis en pilotage automatique à 13 000 mètres d'altitude. Destination l'Australie et le crash assuré. Plus que sept heures de vol à vivre pour raconter à la boîte noire ses incroyables secrets. Quelques litres de kérosène avant de finir éclaté en milliards de petits débris... Un roman imprévisible, inoubliable et un sommet de l'humour sauvage qui confirme Chuck Palahniuk comme l'un des écrivains de fiction les plus originaux du moment.

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 is transformed from the beautiful center of attention to 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.