Palahniuk, Chuck

views updated

Chuck Palahniuk

Personal

Name is pronounced "paula-nik"; born February 21, 1962, in Pasco, WA; son of Fred (a railroad brakeman) and Carol (an office manager at a nuclear power plant) Palahniuk. Education: University of Oregon, received journalism degree, 1986.

Addresses

Home—Portland, OR. Agent—Edward Hibbert, Donadio and Olson, Inc., 121 West 27th St., Suite 704, New York, NY 10001.

Career

Novelist. Briefly worked for a newspaper in Gresham, OR; worked for Freightliner as a service documentation specialist for thirteen years; appeared as rapper "Chucky P." on BBC Radio.

Member

National Cacophony Society.

Awards, Honors

Oregon Book Award and Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, both for Fight Club; Bram Stoker Award for best novel, Horror Writers Association, 2003, for Lullaby.

Writings

NOVELS

Fight Club, Norton (New York, NY), 1996.

Invisible Monsters, Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

Survivor, Norton (New York, NY), 1999.

Choke, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2001.

Lullaby (first in a trilogy), Doubleday (New York, NY), 2002.

Diary, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2003.

NONFICTION

Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Crown (New York, NY), 2003.

Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2004.

Palahniuk's stories and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, journals, and newspapers including Playboy, Gear, Independent, LA Weekly, Portland Mercury, and Black Book.

Adaptations

Fight Club was released as a film in 1999.

Work in Progress

Two more novels to complete the trilogy begun with Lullaby; a horror short story collection; a book on minimalism.

Sidelights

"Chuck Palahniuk, with his thumb-in-your eye themes—fear, chaos, environmental ruin, the rhinestone artifice of the average human's soul—is the kind of wondrously pointed writer you dread reading," observed Gillian Flynn in Entertainment Weekly. Time magazine contributor Richard Lacayo noted that "dark riffing on modernity is the reason people read Palahniuk. His books are not so much novels as jagged fables, cautionary tales about the creeping peril presented by almost everything." And William Leith, writing in England's Telegraph Online, commented that Palahniuk's novels "are nihilistic, modern and full of weird, fascinating ideas." Leith went on to list topics the Oregon author deals with: "He likes necrophilia, overeating, mass murder, the media, cryogenics, rage and sexual perversions. Each book is stranger and more sinister than the last." Palahniuk began his writing career with the apocalyptic novel Fight Club, which became a cult classic and the basis of the 1999 Hollywood film by the same name, starring Brad Pitt. It features a secret fight club in which men beat each other bloody and whose members eventually develop into an anarchist army that is funded by selling soap made of liposuctioned human fat.

Palahniuk's subsequent works have featured equally shocking and bizarre premises and are also sustained by the author's black humor and cynical viewpoint. On the heels of the film, Palahniuk quickly published several more novels, Invisible Monsters, Survivor, Choke, Lullaby, and Diary, as well as a travel guide, Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, and a collection of articles and essays, Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. Speaking with C. P. Farley in an interview for Powells.com, Palahniuk announced the main theme of his work: "I think that the central, most American literary theme is the invention of self. We see it in Henry James's Bostonians; we see it in The Great Gatsby; we see it in Breakfast at Tiffany's.... It's such an American genre, this whole idea of reinventing and creating your self based on your dream, or how you perceive yourself to be, or not to be." Palahniuk's dream often takes the form of a nightmare; his dark vision of life has attracted a loyal fan base who crowd his readings, flock to his Web site, which has been nicknamed "the cult," with daily postings, and eagerly await each new novel. These fans can, according to Taylor Antrim, writing in the New York Times, "expect certain things from a Chuck Palahniuk novel: a narrator with a messiah complex, taxonomies of eccentric information, pithy single-sentence paragraphs and a few overexplicit statements of theme."

Violence at the Dark Heart of Things

Born in Pasco, Washington, in 1962, to a father who worked as a railway brakeman and a mother who worked in a nuclear power plant, Palahniuk grew up in the small town of Burbank, Washington, in, as Karen Valby noted in Entertainment Weekly, "a trailer marooned across the street from the Burbank Tavern." Leith described Palahniuk's childhood as "the sort of background that makes you think of a Faulkner novel." Violence was a fact of life in the household; his father, Fred, had hid under a bed as a three-year-old as his own father—Palahniuk's grandfather—roamed the house, shotgun in hand, unsuccessfully searching for him. Having killed his wife, Palahniuk's grandfather finally turned the shotgun on himself. Growing up, Palahniuk was not close to his father; at one point he threatened to cut off his boy's finger for bad behavior; Fred left the family when Palahniuk was fourteen and married three more times.

Palahniuk found some refuge in reading; he went to the University of Oregon, where he majored in journalism, and worked for a time after graduation as a reporter on an Oregon newspaper. More comfortable in the blue-collar world, he took a job with Freightliner. His job documenting diesel service procedures left little time for writing. He thought about waiting to write until he retired but came to the conclusion that he might die before that happened. So Palahniuk snatched moments in waiting rooms, laundromats, and traffic jams, squeezing in the work whenever he could. He sent a manuscript to a publisher and it was rejected, presumably because of its rather shocking content. Instead of feeling discouraged, Palahniuk got mad and decided to send the publisher an even more outrageous story. The novel Fight Club was the result.

Fight Club

Palahniuk has related how life experiences have inspired his novels. Fight Club was born of Palahniuk's own fights, and of the lack of response his bruised and bloody face got from coworkers. He told Salon. com writer Sarah Tomlinson that he realized "you could really do anything you wanted in your personal life, as long as you looked so bad that people would not want to know the details. I started thinking of a fight club as a really structured, controlled way of just going nuts in a really safe situation." However, in Fight Club this "safe" pastime has frightening consequences. The unnamed narrator has a bland, unhappy life, and has been seeking solace, however undeserved, by faking terminal illness at support group meetings. He befriends Tyler Durden, an unpredictable young man who suggests starting the fight club. It is Durden who starts having an affair with Marla, a woman the narrator met at a meeting where he claimed to have testicular cancer. The fight club inspires countless others and it turns out that Durden has larger, destructive plans for his army of thousands of nihilists. He unveils Project Mayhem, a plan to terrorize corporate America by attacking the world's tallest building.

Critics described Fight Club as both disturbing and fascinating. A Publishers Weekly writer warned that almost any reader was likely to find something offensive. The reviewer called the book "caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling" as well as "utterly original." In a Booklist review, Thomas Gaughan described Fight Club as "gen X's most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities" and a work sure to disturb young readers' parents. He concluded that it was "powerful, and possibly brilliant."

A Guardian Unlimited article by Stuart Jeffries considered the literary and social relevance of Fight Club. Jeffries called the novel "the 90s reply to American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's satire on youthful white collar greed and banality in Wall Street in the 80s." His interview with Palahniuk revealed that the author has read Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus; and Jeffries felt that "it shows in his nihilistic insistence on destroying lifestyles that serve nobody well, and recognizing the importance of mortality." The reviewer also remarked that the book "has proven appealing to men of a certain age. At times it seems to be exclusively about men whose fathers were absent during their childhoods." Moreover, Jeffries surmised that at several points the novel "suggests that all-male clubs are the only way men can re-establish their male potency."

Concern about the impact of Fight Club increased with the release of the feature film. The emergence of copycat clubs did not disturb Palahniuk, who believes that their members were probably already expressing their violent impulses in other, more dangerous ways. However, a rumor emerged that Twentieth Century-Fox delayed the film's release following the tragic shootings at Columbine High School. In an interview for the Orlando Weekly Movies, Palahniuk indirectly commented on the possibility of links between his writing and such acts of violence. He called the fight club experience "an honest, consensual violence. . . . It's not victimizing violence. It's not a chickenshit walking into a crowded place full of helpless people with a gun."

Examines Darker Aspects of Life

The author's second novel, Survivor, is also a violent, darkly comic, bitter picture of American life. Its chapters proceed in reverse chronological order, beginning with forty-seven, and the pages begin with number 289 and end with one. Thus, the reader is introduced to the protagonist Tender Branson moments before his death, as his plane is about to crash into the Australian desert. Branson is telling his story into the jet's black box, explaining how he came to be the last living member of the Creedish Death Cult. His story is outrageous: as a Creedalist, he became an unpaid servant in exchange for donations to the church; slave labor charges and an FBI raid on the Creedish compound resulted in a mass suicide; media interest in Branson turned him into a celebrity and book-selling, self-help guru. But it is also revealed that the cult suicides may in fact be murders, and that Branson's brother Adam may be a survivor and a serial killer.

Reviews of Survivor were enthusiastic, although Fight Club sometimes cast a shadow over the new novel. A Kirkus Reviews writer called the book "brilliant, engrossing, substantial, and fun" and asserted that "Palahniuk carves out credible, moving dramas from situations that seemed simply outlandish and sad on the evening news." In the Oregonian, Frank Bures suggested that with Survivor Palahniuk "demonstrates his ranges as a writer." Bures compared Fight Club's "twisted carpe diem" to this novel's "ironic laments." The reviewer concluded, "If there is a central theme to Survivor, it is . . . disgust at superficiality and sameness. Yet it gets lost among the other questions raised about free will, fate, mindless following, religious hypocrisy, death and other existential, if tangential, matters." Village Voice writer Lily Burana was disappointed by what followed a fascinating open: "Problem is, once it is revealed that Tender is the last surviving Creedish, the book becomes predictable. The narrative swerves from the deft, carefully imagined satire of a tiny, workaday life and plunges straight into a 'Toontown-like hyperbolic broadcast of living large before the masses." At the review's end, she also pondered whether "many young-adult readers—hungry kids trapped in suburban and rural America . . . might make a cult hero of Palahniuk."

The original manuscript for Palahniuk's third novel, Invisible Monsters, was the story that publishers rejected prior to Fight Club. Palahniuk says he is glad to have had the chance to improve the novel, and that some eighty-five percent of the book was rewritten. In part a satirical stab at the fashion industry, he conceived the story after reading fashion magazines in the laundromat. Commenting on the novel in the Village Voice, Palahniuk said, "Monsters is a Valley of the Dolls book, a summer beach book. . . . Don't take it very seriously." However, he also noted it was inspired by French philosopher Michael Foucault in its exploration of identity.

Like Survivor, Invisible Monsters begins at its story's end; however, it then reveals episodes in Shannon McFarland's life in a random sequence. Shannon is a former model who lost the lower half of her face in a shooting. She is left without a career and is filled with anger at her ex-boyfriend Manus and her ex-girlfriend Evie, who had an affair with Manus after the shooting.

Convinced that the pair may be responsible for her wounds, Shannon goes on a cross-country road trip with a new friend, the transgendered Brandy Alexander. Their goal is to confront Evie in Texas, where she is about to be married. In the process, Shannon and Brandy kidnap Manus and start secretly feeding him female hormone pills. In the process, it is revealed that Brandy is Shannon's brother, whom she had believed was dead of AIDS.

The plot's twists and jumps left many reviewers on the fence about Invisible Monsters. In the San Francisco Chronicle, James Sullivan said, "All this rough-housing will make readers punch-drunk by the book's climax. It's Palahniuk's least successful effort to date, yet there are more than enough moments of insight to recommend 'Invisible Monsters.'" A Kirkus Reviews writer called it "too clever by half: a Chinese box of a novel fascinating in its intricacies but pretty hard to get a grip on whole." The reviewer for Publishers Weekly tired of the flashbacks and use of "a fashion photographers commands . . . to signpost the narrator's epiphanies," but acknowledged that the book "does have fun moments when campy banter tops the heroine's flat, whiny bathos." Writing for Booklist, George Needham concluded, "By the end, most readers will be both exhausted and exhilarated."

Palahniuk's fourth novel, Choke, firmly cemented his reputation as a skilled writer who continues to keep his readers uncomfortable. In this novel, the central character is Victor Mancini, a young man who supplements his paycheck in an unusual way: he fakes choking in a different restaurant every night, confident that someone will volunteer to save him and, upon hearing his hard-luck story, send him cash on a regular basis. Victor is a medical school dropout, works a menial job at a historical village, and is a sex addict who indulges himself mid-flight in airplane bathrooms. Flashbacks show that Victor's mother, now a senile woman in a nursing home, gave him a miserable childhood. However, he still wants to help her. A mysterious doctor at the nursing home reveals that his mother believes he was conceived by her contact with a holy relic, which would make him the son of Jesus.

In a review for the New York Times Janet Maslin was both frustrated and impressed by elements in Choke. She introduced the storyline with the comment that "Mr. Palahniuk is hard to beat if you'd like a working definition of the adolescent male state of mind." And she named him among writers such as Irvine Welsh and J. G. Ballard, who are "writers equally devoted to bizarre circumstances and the bleakest of humor." Yet Maslin admired "the sheer, anarchic fierceness of imagination that fuels [the novel's] wildest individual vignettes." She summarized that Choke was "an uneven but still raw and vital book, punctuated with outrageous, off-the-wall moments that work as often as not."

In the Oregonian John Foyston confessed that the novel contained several details that he could not openly discuss in "a family newspaper." Foyston came to the conclusion that "With this, his fourth novel, Palahniuk's strengths and weaknesses are plain enough. His most endearing trait—the thing that keeps me reading—is that marvelous quicksilver voice of his. 'Choke' also benefits from Palahniuk's taste for obscure and obsessive erudition, which shows up in the ongoing internal monologue of an AWOL med student." The reviewer was left wanting more plot and more agreeable characters, yet he felt "the exuberance of [Palahniuk's] language makes it still worthwhile to brave these often chilly and dark waters."

Real Life Inspiration

Palahniuk, known for wildness in his own life, has not fought since the mid-1990s, but violence once again struck his family when his father was killed by the ex-husband of a woman he was dating. The murder occurred at about the time of the release of the movie Fight Club. The perpetrator was caught, despite his efforts to make the shooting look like an accidental death, and he was found guilty of homicide in 2001. Palahniuk, as the son of the victim, had the option to plead for the death penalty—an option he ultimately chose. The whole experience made him think about what it would be like to have the power of life and death over others simply with one's own desire or spoken word. The result was the 2002 horror novel Lullaby, the first of a proposed trilogy. In this bizarre tale a newspaper reporter, Carl Streator, who is writing a story about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) discovers a macabre connection with a book of poetry. In each of the five cases of SIDS he investigates he finds the same edition of the book in which an ancient African poem has been reprinted. The poem was originally intended as a way to decrease the population of tribes in desperate times when there was not enough food to go around. Now it has been carelessly reprinted in a book, and the dilemma the reporter faces is that he does not know how many copies of the book are extant and how to get rid of them before it is too late. Teaming up with a real estate agent, Helen Hoover Boyle, who also knows the "culling song," Streator sets out to destroy all known copies of the book. Two more strange characters join in this eerie quest: Mona, Helen's assistant, and her boyfriend, Oyster. "This is vintage Palahniuk," noted Andrea Kempf in Library Journal: "weird, creepy, twisted, upsetting, and ultimately a great read." A contributor for Publishers Weekly observed that "hilarious satire, both supernatural and scatological ensues" with this road trip to save the world. However, for this same reviewer "the chief significance of this novel is Palahniuk's decision to commit to a genre." Prior to this, the writer had been "a genre of one," according the reviewer. His choice of the horror genre was in part inspired, Palahniuk observed, by a post-9/11 mentality in which "transgressive" literature such as his was more suspect.

Maslin, writing in the New York Times, was again both fascinated and repelled by Palahniuk's "tireless pursuit of the outrageous," which led him to write this novel about a song that kills. Maslin went on to compare the author's work with that of Kurt Vonnegut, as he "juggles nihilism and idealism with fluid, funny ease, and he repeats and rephrases word patterns until they take on an almost mystical aspect." For Maslin, this novel "further refines [Palahniuk's] ability to create parables that are as substantial as they are off-the-wall." Virginia Heffernan, in the New York Times Book Review, was far less impressed. She found Lullaby a "nauseating picaresque" with "less than zero sacred." Heffernan further noted that the novel "functions on one level as an extended, literate dead-baby joke," and also that it "feels like a reckless first draft, seemingly written on a binge." However, a critic for Kirkus Reviews saw more to like in the novel, calling it the kind of "outrageous, darkly comic fun . . . you'd expect from Palahniuk." And Booklist's John Green

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

felt that what separated Lullaby from Palahniuk's earlier work "is its emotional depth, its ability to explore the unbearable pain of losing a child just as richly as it laments our consume-or-die worldview."

Palahniuk's sixth novel, Diary, appeared in 2003. The book is told in the form of a diary that Misty Marie Kleinman writes for her husband, Peter Wilmot, who lies in a coma after having tried to kill himself. An indication of Peter's ineffectuality is that he attempted to asphyxiate himself with carbon monoxide in the garage with a car only half full of gas. Misty is an artist who prefers the blandly pictorial to edgy modern art; she was attracted to Peter originally because of the island he took her to live on: Waytansea Island is right out of Misty's picturesque dreams. However, the picturesque soon spoils; she becomes a waitress to support her daughter and mother-in-law. Meanwhile, the houses that Peter decorated before his suicide attempt begin having problems: rooms start disappearing from them. And Waytansea is becoming overrun with tourists. Misty's friends and acquaintances mysteriously want her to paint more and more; if she stops, she gets excruciating headaches. To force her to paint more, the islanders ensure that her life continues to be miserable.

As usual, critics both loved and hated this novel, sometimes simultaneously. Calling it an "absorbing thriller with big ideas about Art," Antrim further described the book as at once "creepy and inventive." A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that Palahniuk's first page "captures the reader hook, line and sinker," and the novel as a whole is a "twisted tale [that is] one of his most memorable works to date." Booklist's John Green similarly found that the author's "fantastically grotesque premise propels the story," but also found fault with the writing, which "lacks the satirical precision" of his other works. Indeed, for Green, the book "often reads like a self-indulgent complaint about the terrible suffering of artists." More positive was the evaluation of Book's James Sullivan, who found Diary a "deft meditation on great art and the toll it takes." Yet Sullivan, too, encountered a downside, observing that Palahniuk's novel is "sometimes easier to admire for its literary daredevilry than it is to enjoy." David Wright, reviewing the novel in Library Journal, called Diary a "blend of paranoiac horror along the lines of Rosemary's Baby." Flynn, in Entertainment Weekly, was surprised to discover that the novel is "the closest thing to a plain old mystery Palahniuk has ever written." Still, the signature Palahniuk is there, Flynn noted, calling the work "pretty stunning, funky stuff." And Marc Nesbitt, writing in the Washington Post Book World, allowed that the novel "may be trying to do too many things at once." However, Nesbitt further commented, "when it's on, it's on, and it could be Chuck Palahniuk's most ambitions novel to date."

Palahniuk branches into nonfiction with his 2003 Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, which he contributed to the series "Crown Walks," which has well-known writers introduce their cities in walking tours. Palahniuk, not surprisingly, created a "quirky guide," according to Antrim, which eschews the usual tourist sites such as Portland's Rose Garden, and the usual Frommer guidebook details such as fancy restaurants. Instead, Palahniuk shows the reader/visitor the world's largest hairball, or a movie house playing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or a cafe that boasts an annual Emily Dickinson singalong. Noah Robischon, writing in Entertainment Weekly, dubbed this an "anti-Frommer guide," and a "street atlas of the weird [which] makes for an intoxicating trip." For Booklist's Bill Ott, Fugitives and Refugees is a "travel book like no other," and an "unbuttoned guide." Similarly, Library Journal contributor John McCormick felt it was a "description of the dark underside of Portland," and an "entertaining read," though it "will not appeal to everyone." More prosaically, a contributor for Publishers Weekly described the book as a "mixture of practical travel guide and personal vignettes," while a critic for Kirkus Reviews concluded that Palahniuk's book is "another solid entry in the 'Crown Journey' series, with its premium on deep-dish subjectivity."

If you enjoy the works of Chuck Palahniuk

If you enjoy the works of Chuck Palahniuk, you might want to check out the following books:

J. G. Ballard, Crash, 1973.

Craig Clevenger, The Contortionist's Handbook, 2002.

Brett Easton Ellis, American Psycho, 1991.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides, 1994.

Palahniuk has not been spoiled by success. He continues to focus on his work, including novels, short stories and nonfiction. In the 2004 collection Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories he gathers essays and articles dealing with culture figures such as Juliette Lewis and Marilyn Manson, takes a behind-thescenes look at Hollywood in the filming of his Fight Club, recalls the difficult time of his father's killing and the subsequent trial, and even examines the hard knocks of college wrestling, among other topics. A short story collection is also in the works, built around the tale "Guts," published in Playboy. He lives on a farm outside of Portland, and when not writing, tries to tend to his chickens; plans for a writing colony up the Columbia River are in the works. He also battles insomnia, and has found a new technique to deal with it, as he explained to Valby in Entertainment Weekly: he fantasizes that he is dead. "I'm in a casket. I don't have to do anything. All the pressure is off. Every time I breathe out, I'm going to be more relaxed. I focus on the 'You're dead, boy, all the bets are off, everything's okay and it doesn't matter.'"

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Book, September-October, 2002, Michael Kaplan, interview with Palahniuk, p. 13; September-October, 2003, James Sullivan, review of Diary, p. 92.

Booklist, July, 1996, Thomas Gaughan, review of Fight Club, p. 1804; September 15, 1999, George Needham, review of Invisible Monsters, p. 233; August, 2002, John Green, review of Lullaby, p. 1887; July, 2003, John Green, review of Diary, p. 1846; July, 2003, Bill Ott, review of Fugitives and Refugees, p. 1858; December 15, 2003, Ted Hipple, review of Diary, p. 762.

Entertainment Weekly, May 25, 2001, Troy Patterson, "Hard to Swallow: In Choke, the Latest from the Author of Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk's Hip Nihilism Comes to Naught," p. 72; July 18, 2003, Noah Robischon, review of Fugitives and Refugees, p. 80; September 5, 2003, Gillian Flynn, review of Diary, p. 79; September 26, 2003, Karen Valby, "Chuck Palahniuk Does Not Attend Fight Club," p. 62; September 26, 2003, Noah Robischon, "Joining the Club," p. 67.

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1998, review of Survivor, p. 1755; August 1, 1999, review of Invisible Monsters, p. 1160; June 15, 2002, review of Lullaby, p. 834; May 1, 2003, review of Fugitives and Refugees, pp. 663.

Kliatt, September, 2003, Jacqueline Edwards, review of Diary, pp. 54-55.

Library Journal, March 1, 2001, Heath Madom, review of Choke, p. 132; August, 2002, Andrea Kempf, review of Lullaby, p. 144; July, 2003, John McCormick, review of Fugitives and Refugees, p. 112; July, 2003, David Wright, review of Diary, p. 125.

Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1999, review of Fight Club, p. 1; October 6, 2002, Susan Salter Reynolds, review of Lullaby, p. E1; August 10, 2003, Christopher Reynolds, review of Fugitives and Refugees, p. L9.

Newsweek, September 1, 2003, Andrew Phillips, interview with Palahniuk, p. 10.

New York Times, May 24, 2001, Janet Maslin, "An Immature Con Man with a Mom Problem"; September 12, 2002, Janet Maslin, review of Lullaby, p. E9; August 31, 2003, Taylor Antrim, review of Fugitives and Refugees, and Diary, p. 5.

New York Times Book Review, May 27, 2001, Jennifer Reese, review of Choke, p. 16; October 20, 2002, Virginia Heffernan, review of Lullaby, p. 17.

New York Times Magazine, September 29, 2002, John Glassie, "The Pugilist Novelist," p. 21.

Oregonian, March 10, 1999, Frank Bures, "Survivor Stews over Superficiality of Society"; May 13, 2001, John Foyston, review of Choke.

Publishers Weekly, June 3, 1996, review of Fight Club, p. 60; July 5, 1999, review of Invisible Monsters, p. 56; March 20, 2000, John F. Baker, "'Fight Club' Author to Broadway," p. 15; April 2, 2001, review of Choke, p. 37; July 1, 2002, review of Lullaby, pp. 46-47; July 8, 2002, John F. Baker, "No D'day Choke for Chuck," p. 12; September 2, 2002, interview with Palahniuk, p. 49; September 30, 2002, Daisy Maryles, "Not a Sleeper," p. 18; May 12, 2003, review of Fugitives and Refugees, pp. 51-52; July 7, 2003, review of Choke, pp. 26-27; July 7, 2003, review of Diary, pp. 50-51; September 8, 2003, Daisy Maryles, "Dear Diary," p. 18; December 1, 2003, review of Diary, p. 20.

San Francisco Chronicle, September 12, 1999, James Sullivan, "Model Misbehavior."

Time, September 23, 2002, Richard Lacayo, review of Lullaby, p. 76.

Village Voice, March 2, 1999, Lily Burana, "Cult Club"; October 19, 1999, Emily Jenkins, "Extreme Sport."

Washington Post Book World, May 27, 2001, review of Choke, p. 6; August 31, 2003, Marc Nesbitt, review of Diary, p. p.

Western Journal of Medicine, May, 2002, Shahin Chandrasoma, interview with Palahniuk, pp. 200-202.

ONLINE

Chuck Palahniuk Home Page,http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/ (March 4, 2004).

Guardian Unlimited,http://www.film.guardian.co.uk/ (May 12, 2000), Stuart Jeffries, "Bruise Control."

Movie Poop Shoot,http://www.moviepoopshoot.com/ (February 5, 2004), Joshua Jabcuga, review of Postcards from the Future.

Onion Club,http://www.theonionavclub.com/ (November 13, 2002), Tasha Robinson, interview with Palahniuk.

Oregonian Online,http://www.oregonlive.com/ (December 12, 2003), Shawn Levy, review of Postcards from the Future; December 19, 2003, "We Barely Saw Ye, Chuck."

Orlando Weekly Movies,http://www.orlandoweekly.com/ (October 15, 1999), Serena Donadoni, "Going for Broke."

Powells.com,http://www.powells.com/ (September 4, 2003), C. P. Farley, "Author Interviews: Chuck Palahniuk."

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (October 13, 1999), Sarah Tomlinson, "Is It Fistfighting, or Just Multi-tasking?"

Telegraph Online,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (October 21, 2003), William Leith, "A Writer's Life: Chuck Palahniuk."