Chuck Palahniuk

The leader of a suicide cult commandeers a Boeing 747 and dictates his life story into the black box while waiting for the plane to run out of fuel. The suicide is the ultimate media event of Tender Branson, self-styled messiah, many of whose followers have already killed themselves. Or were they murdered? By the author of Fight Club.

A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act of mass destruction disguised as a science project. Narrated by skinny 13-year-old Pgymy, the propulsive plot deconstructs American fixtures,...

Investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, journalist Carl Streator finds the same anthology of poems and rhymes at each child's bedside. The book is always opened to a specific African chant--a culling song that kills when recited, whether silently or aloud. Suddenly, Carl's knowledge of the chant makes him an involuntary serial murderer and he must learn to control himself, then remove all copies of the book from libraries across the country.

The first rule about fight club is you don't talk about fight club.In his debut novel, Chuck Palahniuk showed himself to be his generation's most visionary satirist. 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 boxing matches in the basement of bars. There two men fight "as long as they have to." A gloriously original work that exposes what is at the...

Politicians have brought the nation to the brink of a third world war in an effort to control the burgeoning population of young males. Working-class men dream of burying the elites. Professors propound theories that offer students only the bleakest future. Into this dyspeptic time, a blue-black book is launched carrying such wisdom as: Imagine there's no God; there is no Heaven or Hell; there is only your son and his son and his son and the world...

"Victor Mancini, a dropout from medical school, has devised a complicated scam to pay for his mother's elder care: Pretend to be choking on a piece of food in a restaurant and the person who "saves you", will feel responsible for the rest of his life. Multiply that a couple of hundred times and you generate a healthy flow of checks, week in, week out. Between fake choking gigs, Victor works at Colonial Dunsboro with a motley group of losers and stoners...

Hazie Coogan, who for decades has tended to the outsized needs of veteran actress Katherine "Miss Kathie" Kenton, discovers that bounder Webster Carlton Westward III has written a celebrity tell-all memoir foretelling Miss Kathie's death in a forthcoming Lillian Hellman-penned musical extravaganza. As the body count mounts, Hazie must execute a plan to save Katherine Kenton for her fans--and for posterity.

"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. First there is the matter of the veritable...

A full-frontal triple-X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before. A porn star intends to cap her career by breaking the record for on-screen fornication.

A gang of adolescent terrorists trained by an unspecified totalitarian state (the boys and girls are guided by quotations attributed to Marx, Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, etc.) infiltrate America as foreign exchange students. Their mission: to bring the nation to its knees through Operation Havoc, an act of mass destruction disguised as a science project.