Description:

From Publishers Weekly

Featuring soap made from human fat, waiters at high-class restaurants who do unmentionable things to soup and an underground organization dedicated to inflicting a violent anarchy upon the land, Palahniuk's apocalyptic first novel is clearly not for the faint of heart. The unnamed (and extremely unreliable) narrator, who makes his living investigating accidents for a car company in order to assess their liability, is combating insomnia and a general sense of anomie by attending a steady series of support-group meetings for the grievously ill, at one of which (testicular cancer) he meets a young woman named Marla. She and the narrator get into a love triangle of sorts with Tyler Durden, a mysterious and gleefully destructive young man with whom the narrator starts a fight club, a secret society that offers young professionals the chance to beat one another to a bloody pulp. Mayhem ensues, beginning with the narrator's condo exploding and culminating with a terrorist attack on the world's tallest building. Writing in an ironic deadpan and including something to offend everyone, Palahniuk is a risky writer who takes chances galore, especially with a particularly bizarre plot twist he throws in late in the book. Caustic, outrageous, bleakly funny, violent and always unsettling, Palahniuk's utterly original creation will make even the most jaded reader sit up and take notice. Movie rights to Fox 2000.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From

In the world of Fight Club, healthy young people go to meetings of cancer support groups because only there can they find human warmth and compassion. It's a world where young men gather in the basements of bars to fight strangers "just as long as they have to." And it's a world where "nobody cared if he lived or died, and the feeling was fucking mutual." Messianic nihilist Tyler Durden is the inventor of Fight Club. Soon thousands of young men across the country are reporting to their work cubes with flattened noses, blackened eyes, and shattered teeth, looking forward to their next bare-knuckle maiming. The oracular, increasingly mysterious Durden then begins to harness the despair, alienation, and violence he sees so clearly into complete anarchy. Every generation frightens and unnerves its parents, and Palahniuk's first novel is gen X's most articulate assault yet on baby-boomer sensibilities. This is a dark and disturbing book that dials directly into youthful angst and will likely horrify the parents of teens and twentysomethings. It's also a powerful, and possibly brilliant, first novel. Thomas Gaughan