Customer Reviews

Sacred and Immoral: On the Writings of Chuck Palahniuk

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This book is expensive, but not because they are 'money grabbing' or trying to rip people off and make loads of money out of it. The following is a quote from the guy who made the book Jeff Sartain.....

The goal of this volume was to release a piece of scholarship on Chuck Palahniuk's work after "Fight Club." Since the film came out, there has been a lot of scholarship and commentary about the book and the film, but almost no scholarly work dedicated to Chuck's ever-growing catalog of great books. Sacred and Immoral is our effort to start filling in this gap in academic literature, so that scholars and teachers have tools to build projects and classes on Chuck's later work.

Unfortunately (as one Amazon troll so eloquently noted), the volume is a bit pricey. Unfortunately this is one of the downsides to academic publishing -- the audience for scholarly work is much smaller, so the price for each volume has to be proportionally higher to offset the printing costs for a relatively small run of books. Believe me, no one publishes scholarly volumes to get rich; the high price of scholarly volumes reflects the high overhead involved in producing hardcover books in small runs.

As such, the primary audiences for volumes like mine are scholars and libraries. If you don't want to buy the book yourself, but do want to read it, encourage your local or university library to purchase a copy for their collection. The access the library provides helps fulfill the volume's primary purpose, which is to expand the conversation about Chuck into new territory.

This book is a valuable first in Palahniuk scholarship! It should be invaluable to film and literary scholars as well as culture theorists alike who study and teach the works of Palahniuk. The essays provide a good variety of critical perspectives from gender theory to Foucault. What is more it addresses Palahniuk texts beyond Fight Club, the texts often critically ignored, but as this collection shows, easily just as rewarding to serious study. The essays by Johnson and Riekki are particularly engaging and thoughful. In summary, a very much needed scholarly collection that also makes for a marvelously interesting read.