Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories [Hardcover]

Chuck Palahniuk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 15, 2004

From the bestselling author of Fight Club and Diary, a collection of essays and journalistic pieces that prove that real life has imagination beaten cold in the strangeness and wonder departments

Chuck Palahniuk’s world has always been, well, different from yours and mine. The pieces that comprise Stranger Than Fiction, his first nonfiction collection, prove just how different, in ways both highly entertaining and deeply unsettling. Encounters with alternative culture heroes Marilyn Manson and Juliette Lewis; the peculiar wages of fame attendant on the big budget film production of the movie Fight Club; life as an assembly-line drive train installer by day, hospice volunteer driver by night; the really peculiar lives of submariners; the really violent world (and mangled ears) of college wrestlers; the underground world of iron-pumping anabolic steroid gobblers; the immensely upsetting circumstances of his father’s murder and the trial of his killer—each essay or vignette offers a unique facet of existence as lived in and/or observed by one of our most flagrantly daring and original literary talents.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This collection from shock novelist Palahniuk (Choke; Lullaby) is an eye-opening look at the raw material that goes into Palahniuk's fiction, as well as proof that the novelist's art is derived from keen observation and recording of details. Often these are as grotesque as a closeup in a horror film (e.g., in talking to a group of wrestlers enduring Olympic tryouts, Palahniuk focuses on their injuries, both physical and emotional). Half the essays are magazine assignments and include insightful profiles of rock star Marilyn Manson, indie-movie queen Juliette Lewis and a high schooler who wants to explore space via a homemade rocket. Others offer the author's impressions of a demolition derby, the Rock Creek Lodge Testicle Festival and life aboard the USS Louisiana. Palahniuk often philosophizes, dwelling on the effects his fiction has had on "reality," especially the obsession his fans have had with his novel Fight Club. Palahniuk is fixated on the transformation of life's raw material into fiction and the writing process itself, which he sees as having the potential for self-fulfillment. (Incidentally, Brad Pitt, who played Fight Club's protagonist, emerges as Palahniuk's alter ego, and a number of the essays play on this theme, creating a patchwork memoir.) Palahniuk's fans will undoubtedly revel in the secrets the author reveals. Newcomers might initially feel queasy, but they're likely to warm up to his visceral prose and come to enjoy it.
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From Booklist

From Fight Club (1996) and the guys who fight for sport to Choke (2001) and a young man who might literally be the son of Jesus, Palahniuk's novels are consistently populated with extraordinary eccentrics. So it's no surprise that in this collection of previously published magazine pieces, he writes mostly of the bizarre. Palahniuk focuses on themes of solitude and community, on our need to feel simultaneously special and a part of something. He attends the Olympic wrestling trials, for instance, and examines why men endure cauliflower ear and debilitating injury to participate in a sport that no one watches or cares about. The personal essays (Palahniuk describes a romp through Seattle while wearing a dog costume, for instance) don't shine as much as the journalistic pieces, although fans will be interested to learn personal details about Chuck and his experiences with quasi celebrity. But the best narratives here-- particularly a lengthy one on Americans who build European-style castles--show Palahniuk's deep compassion for oddballs and misfits, a hard-boiled kindness for which his fans revere him. John Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 233 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (June 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385504489
• ISBN-13: 978-0385504485
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #698,452 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Chuck Palahniuk's novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters. Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy, and Palahniuk's nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting takes from an uncanny observer, August 14, 2005

By 

Charles S. Houser (Binghamton, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (Paperback)

I was fascinated by the level of thinking that went into the movie FIGHT CLUB. It motivated me to read Palahniuk's novel which was the film's basis. The thinking, the cleverness, was there too. And though the novel was extreme, on the verge of being sci-fi or a futurist fable, there was something quite plausible about it as well. The emotional jadedness, the fear of emasculation, the fakery by which the nameless main character lived out his life all seemed quite authentic. I was genuinely intrigued by what Palahniuk had created and made a mental note to read more by this author.

STRANGER THAN FICTION is a collection of articles written by Palahniuk for a variety of magazines. If you're fascinated by the "fight club" phenomenon, you'll find some satisfying glimpses into that story's little sojourn into Hollywoodland and the popular consciousness scattered among these articles. But even more so, STRANGER THAN FICTION offers glimpses into the absurdities, shallowness, and violence that constitute the end-of-the-millennium, life-in-America backdrop for that novel: the world of amateur wrestling ("Where Meat Comes From"), conferences where writers have seven minutes to pitch their stories to agents, publishers, or movie producers ("You Are Here"), a demolition derby in Washington State for combine drivers ("Demolition"), people obsessed with building medieval castles in the late 20th century U.S.A. ("Confessions in Stone"), users of steroids ("Frontiers"), the homoerotic nature of life on a submarine ("The People Can"), and an amateur rocket-maker seeking to win a ten million dollar prize being offered to the first private group to put a rocket into the atmosphere ("Human Error"). My favorite pieces, however, were the longer ones gathered in the "Portraits" section: actress Juliette Lewis ("In Her Own Words"), gay editor and political observer Andrew Sullivan ("Why Isn't He Budging?"), shock-artist Marilyn Manson ("Reading Yourself"), and Michelle Keating, a handler of rescue dogs ("Bodhisattvas"). What you get from Palahniuk consistently is a vision of people coping--one way or another, but coping nonetheless. And in an end-of-the millennium sort of way, this is the closest any of us is likely to get to hope. As Palahniuk says of himself in "Almost California", a self-mocking description of his visit to 20th Century Fox when FIGHT CLUB was in development, "That's why I write, because life never works except in retrospect. And writing makes you look back. Because you can't control life, at least you can control your version."

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars B-Side Stories..., June 17, 2004

By 

D. Bakken "dobak" (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (Hardcover)

From the author whose novels have always focused on people out of the mainstream, "Stranger Than Fiction" is a collection of essays/stories/articles that focus on real-life weirdos and other non-conformists.

- Demolition Derby drivers that crash around in farm combines.
- Amateur wrestlers trying out for the Olympics
- Men who build castles
- Disaster rescue people and their dogs
- etc...

While most of the pieces are very good, there are a couple weak spots, most of which consist of the person just talking and very little writing by Chuck. I am a fan of his writing style and would have liked to see more of that instead of those couple interviews. My guess is that they were just thrown in to fill out the book.

I gave it 5 stars because of those 6-8 pieces that I really liked (worth the book price alone).

If you like this book, check out "Fugitives and Refugees", also by Chuck Palahniuk. It is a collection of pieces and lists about his hometown of Portland, Oregon.

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Diversion, But Not Really Stranger Than Fiction, August 20, 2006

By 

Sir Charles Panther "Life is hard. It's hard... (Alexandria, Virginny, USandA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories (Paperback)

I enjoy Palahniuk's other work, so picked this one up. It didn't disappoint, but it just wasn't that compelling. At its most interesting were the portions of the book where Palahniuk was directly experiencing the events, such as his experimentation with anabolic steroids and the horribly depressing essay on his simple day out in Seattle dressed as a big furry dog. His essays on his self-consciousness and naive attempts to be cool and smooth for his brushes with Hollywood power and stardom as Fight Club took off are fascinating.

Other bits were seemingly endless in their tediousness, like the overlong bits on the Pacific Northwest castle builders, and the numbing play-by-play of the combine demo derby.

From the portraits I learned that Juliette Lewis really is the shallow, ditzy vaccuum tube that I've always gotten the impression that she is. And Marilyn Manson is a vapid, trite little huckster who "reads" the tarot by making every single turn of the card relate to things that he's already done or have already happened.

The book is a quick read, and the chapters move quickly enough that the pain of the bad ones doesn't last that long. But overall it's just not that great, far from a Choke or Invisible Monsters. You can see where Palahniuk's characters and situations come from, and he just out and out admits this, that all he writes is an extrapolation of what he's seen and done, and who he knows. Well, duh.

Bottom line: If you're hard-core Palahniuk, this will work for you. If you liked Fight Club and the others, this won't quite get there for you, as his fiction really is more interesting than the reality offered here. If you're a starving writer looking for insight into how one guy managed to get over that wall and eat regularly, then this is definitely one for you.