Chuck Palahniuk, página 3 de 9

Madison, undici anni, figlia di una star del cinema e di un miliardario, è stata dimenticata per le vacanze di Natale nel suo collegio di iperlusso in Svizzera dai genitori. E così Madison riesce nella non facile impresa di morire per una overdose di marijuana. La ragazza non solo scopre di essere morta ma si rende conto di essere finita all'inferno con la non esaltante prospettiva di dovervi trascorrere l'eternità. Ma Madison è una ragazza pratica e decide che prima di tutto deve farsi degli amici, poi deve capire come funzionano le cose all'inferno e, infine, deve cercare di farselo piacere. In poco tempo stringe amicizia con un gruppetto di coetanei: una cheerleader, un secchione, un punkrocker e un giocatore di football. Con loro attraverserà il Deserto di Forfora e scalerà la Montagna delle Unghie Tagliate per arrivare alla città fortificata dove vive Satana...

L'un se nomme Saint Descente de Boyaux, l'autre Dame Clocharde, un autre encore Duc des Vandales. Ainsi de suite jusqu'à l'Agent Cafteur et le Chaînon Manquant. En tout une vingtaine de volontaires ayant quitté abruptement le quotidien sans laisser la moindre trace. L'annonce, discrète dans le journal, leur promettait de se retrouver au secret, sans contact avec l'extérieur, afin d'accoucher enfin du chef-d'œuvre qu'ils portaient en eux. Ce qui était censé être un refuge se révélera un imparable piège. Les mêmes qui affirmaient venir pour écrire avaient tous besoin, pour de multiples raisons plus inavouables les unes que les autres, de fuir la justice et les hommes. Tous à la fin - ou presque ! - auront en effet une histoire à raconter. Ce ne sera certainement pas celle à la • laquelle ils pensaient.

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.

La terrorífica biografía de un personaje igualmente terrorífico. Buster Casey, un chico rebelde adicto a los videojuegos —además de un asesino—, escapa de casa de sus padres y se convierte en el líder de una banda de gamberros motorizados. Después de su espectacular muerte, tres chicos recopilan la información necesaria para formar una historia oral de su vida. Esta antología de anécdotas describe una serie de actos violentos que se propagan como una infección urbana y silenciosa de rabia.

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.

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

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.

During Istanbul's tumultuous 1970s, Kemal Bey, 30-year-old son of an upper-class family, walks readers through a lengthy catalogue of trivial objects, which, though seeming mundane, hold memories of his life's most intimate, irretrievable moments. The main focus of Kemal's peculiar collection of earrings, ticket stubs and drinking glasses is beloved Füsun, his onetime paramour and longtime unrequited love. An 18-year-old virginal beauty, modest shopgirl and poor distant relation, Füsun enters Kemal's successful life just as he is engaged to Sibel, a very special, very charming, very lovely girl.

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.

Buster 'Rant' Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant casey escapes from his small home town for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will ...Viciously incisive and lethally funny social commentary in a novel cast as an oral biography.Palahniuk's latest (Haunted, 2005, etc.) provides a parody of the oral biography format (Edie, Capote), offers homage to both James Dean and J.G. Ballard's Crash and serves to show just how much teenage angst has degenerated since the innocence of Holden Caulfield—all this before a time-warped finale that ... Más turns genealogy into some sort of Mobius strip. Though his voice appears minimally in the narrative, the hero (or is he?) of the novel is Buster (or Buddy) "Rant" Casey, who lives a short life of escalating destruction just to be able to do something, feel something and escape from the rural town that is living death to those who don't manage to leave it. A boy of peculiarly (even mystically) sensual intuition, he initially amuses himself by seeking bites from various animals and insects, launching a rabies epidemic as he passes his infections along through sexual encounters. With his move to the bigger city, he attracts a posse of "Party Crashers," joy riders who spend their evenings in wedding attire crashing into each others' vehicles. One crash kills Rant, who is dead (or is he?) as the novel begins and is eulogized by a Greek chorus of friends, neighbors, relatives and enemies, along with an eyewitness reporter for DRVR Radio Graphic Traffic and an historian whose involvement in the proceedings sustains a mystery through much of the novel. Many of the themes in the author's exploration of the dark underbelly of modern life and culture will be familiar to his ardent fans, but the formal inventiveness of the fictional oral biography provides a fresh twist.Not for everyone, but readers who like to walk on the novelist's wild side will rave.

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.