Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 208 pages; 2009. Review copy. I'll be perfectly frank: I did not expect to like Chuck Palahniuk's latest paperback release because of the sordid subject matter. I wasn't sure I would be entirely comfortable reading about an aging porn star attempting to break the world record for serial fornication with 600 men on camera. But Palahniuk delivers such an extraordinarily...
Someone on YouTube made fake opening creds for the 2010 movie adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's Invisible Monsters. The song choice and everything suits the book perfectly, in my opinion. Lovin' it.
I’ve finished one book and moved on to the next, and in doing so may have wrecked my brain’s transmission. It was a pretty dramatic shift to finish The Long Walk To Freedom by Nelson Mandela (amazon) and start reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Pygmy (amazon), not only because of the drastically different subject matter, but also because [...]
Open a Bookshop, what could possibly go wrong? (Free subscription) | 06/25/2009
we were asked recently if we could sell books for the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks new book Future Tense . We said yes. so last week I cycled from one Wood (Green) to another (St. John's) Wood, a journey of 5.3 miles, and arrived at the very lovely and very secure Synagogue, where I was greeted by a very amused security guard, who exclaimed, after I'd told him I was here to sell some books, 'you're a...
"I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure. A sphinx. A mystery. A blank. Unknown. Undefined." -Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters Source .
This is a very dark comedy directed by Bobcat Goldthwait (Sleeping Dogs Lie) Robin Williams plays Lance, a high school teacher who protects his family from shame following the embarrassing accidental death of his son (autoerotic exfixiation). Lance writes a fake suicide note to cover up the death, but without permission the note is published and becomes an unexpected hit. Keen to be a successful author,...
Pygmy is the first Chuck Palahniuk book I’ve read in years. And if I didn’t have a history of liking his books, there’s no way I would have finished it. There’s not a lot of substance and he tries masking that lack by a gimmicky writing style instead of an interesting story. Pygmy is the nickname [...]
‘Our generation has found its Don DeLillo’ ~ Bret Easton Ellis The boldest, most ambitious novel since Fight Club. Agent Number 67, nicknamed Pygmy for his diminutive size, arrives in the United States from his totalitarian homeland (a mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany), as an “exchange student” into the welcoming arms [...]
Open a Bookshop, what could possibly go wrong? (Free subscription) | 06/14/2009
Today I sold some books. I sold some Lonely Planet travel guides, 2 copies of the '4 hour working week', a copy each of Mez Packer and Jayne Joso's new books and some spiritual stuff. I sold another copy of the New Chuck Palahniuk, some Rastamouse books, kids books, some cards and some giftwrap. I also sold some novels from our novels tables. I packed up some books that didn't sell to return to the...
This is Chuck Palahniuk's 10th novel since the appearance of his ground-breaking debut, Fight Club, 13 years ago, and while he tackles many of the same themes here as he does in his previous work, Pygmy sees him radically branching out stylistically, with only partial success. The story is told by Agent 67, a highly trained secret operative from an unnamed totalitarian regime. Agent 67 is only 13...
Foreign bodies Christopher Tayler gets to the heart of Chuck Palahniuk's latest satire on American culture Christopher Tayler in The Guardian , Saturday 13 June 2009 Chuck Palahniuk is one of those writers who get punished by critics for making them feel embarrassed about the eagerness with which their adolescent selves might have joined the writer's fan base. Fight Club, his first novel, published...
Christopher Tayler gets to the heart of Chuck Palahniuk's latest satire on American culture Chuck Palahniuk is one of those writers who get punished by critics for making them feel embarrassed about the eagerness with which their adolescent selves might have joined the writer's fan base. Fight Club, his first novel, published in 1996, made him famous when the film version came out three years later,...
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